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

by Michael Daly

  All that made for exciting reading, but it also made for nervous investors, who were already unsettled by an economic downturn in Europe and a growing sense that the frenzy of postwar railroad building had exceeded the actual need. Cooke had unexpected difficulty selling the bonds needed to finance his construction and reached a crisis point when the banks demanded $1 million in immediate payment. He defaulted.

  The response to the sudden collapse of the country’s leading financial firm led to a panic that gave the resulting crisis its name. The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. The Panic of 1873 deepened into a prolonged depression and over the next two years 89 of America’s 364 railroads went bust. Some eighteen thousand businesses closed. Unemployment reached 14 percent. The wages of those who had jobs were cut by almost half. Thousands of homes were foreclosed.

  But if people had fewer coins in their pockets, they were more in need of escaping their worries. Barnum leased a large roofless structure on Madison Square in Manhattan that had served as the main depot for the Harlem and New York Railroad until 1871, when its owner moved operations uptown to his new Grand Central Station. Now, in 1874, Barnum arrayed plank seats around a large ring. He named the new venue Barnum’s Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome.

  On his part, Forepaugh was prosperous enough to buy more elephants, so that by 1875 he had five, as well as an 8,600-pound rhinoceros and “the largest and finest living giraffe in America.”

  The caged rhino was paralyzed after it fell through a bridge in upstate New York and was transported to a hotel, where it succumbed to injuries and the hotelier demanded full payment before releasing the body to be skinned. The giraffe died the same day, October 13, 1875, after catching a chill to which its long neck was believed to have made it especially vulnerable. The double loss put all the more premium on the elephants and during the winter break leading to the 1876 season Forepaugh suffered the further expense of retaining Craven to train his herd.

  As evidenced by its posters, the trainer advertised as “Prof. Craven” had still been with the Great London Show in the 1875 season that had just ended. He had apparently remained after it passed into the ownership of a banker named James Kelly and a showman named Henry Barnum, who claimed to be a distant relative of the famous P. T. This other Barnum proved to possess none of his supposed kinsman’s genius for showmanship. That had become clear after the elephant Hebe appeared to become seriously ill as the Great London Show was traveling by rail from Omaha to Kansas City on Sunday, May 29, 1875. The circus had paused to drop Hebe off in St. Joseph, Missouri, where it was scheduled to return for a performance later in the week. The developments on Monday, June 30, had been reported in the Tuesday edition of the St. Joseph Morning Herald.

  “St. Joseph has the honor of having born within its limits the first baby elephant ever born in the United States,” the paper had announced. “All day yesterday, crowds flocked down to see the wee chap, and probably they will increase in number today.”

  The paper had added that “the elephantress and her baby” were expected to be put on display that Wednesday, when the circus returned to St. Joseph. The Wednesday paper had a front-page message from Henry Barnum.

  “Kiss the baby for me. I have named it ‘Joe,’ in honor of fair St. Joseph.”

  But the next morning’s paper had made no mention of the baby. Even an article about the circus’s performance in St. Joseph had said only, “Instead of 5 performing elephants, there were but four. The fifth was taken sick on Monday.”

  On June 12, the New York Clipper had reported, “A baby elephant was ushered into the world at St. Joseph, Mo. on May 31. Its mother travels with Howes’ London Circus.” But that was it and all the showbiz paper of record subsequently said was, “The elephant with Howes’ London Circus, which had been ill, has recovered and rejoined the show.”

  If the birth had been a hoax, the circus would not likely have chosen a venue so small as St. Joseph and certainly would have contrived to present the public with something more than the absence of an adult female. The only plausible explanation is that the baby died sometime between its birth on Monday and the circus’s return on Wednesday.

  There were no newspaper stories about little Joe’s gallant fight for life or his mother’s elephantine grief, as there almost certainly would have been if P. T. Barnum had been involved. What could have been a sensation or at least a drama passed without notice and Henry Barnum continued on his way to going bust.

  When Craven now rejoined the Forepaugh show, he may have brought news of that first and ill-fated birth of an elephant in America. Or word may already have reached the show. Either way, Forepaugh does not seem to have harbored any hopes that the trainer would arrange a coupling of his elephants with more lasting results. The incident could have been taken by Forepaugh as more proof of the popularly held notion that successfully breeding elephants in captivity was impossible.

  What Forepaugh did want Craven to do was teach his elephants tricks such as he had taught the Howes elephants. Craven used kindness augmented by the hoisting powers of blocks and tackle to teach his latest pupils a series of feats culminating in a pyramid that Forepaugh would tout as unique, unequaled by Barnum.

  As the start of the 1876 season neared, Forepaugh asked Craven to travel with the show. The trainer demanded a hefty sum that Forepaugh would have dismissed out of hand had he a ready alternative. The showman stalled.

  “I am very busy now, wait till I get my show open,” Forepaugh reportedly told Craven.

  Meanwhile, Forepaugh’s press agent prepared to put out a story involving the showman’s son and only child, fifteen-year-old Adam Jr., known as Addie. The boy was said to have shown an early passion for elephants, concealing himself in the hay room and peering through a knot in the wall to watch Craven—identified in the account only as “a well known trainer”—at work. Addie supposedly learned of the trainer’s financial demands and suggested to his father that he be allowed to take over training and managing the elephants. The son supposedly revealed that he had not only secretly studied the trainer’s technique, but convinced a circus worker to assist him in putting the elephants through routines of his own in the early morning hours.

  “Pop, I can do it,” Addie is supposed to have told his father.

  The “well known trainer” was still on hand for the season’s first show, in the Forepaugh hometown of Philadelphia. Forepaugh afterward had the elephants brought back into the empty big top. Addie supposedly demonstrated what he had learned. The elder Forepaugh was reportedly so impressed that when the well-known trainer renewed his salary demand that night, the owner dismissed him and put his son in charge.

  Craven would later dispel the myth of the boy peering through the knothole, offering a less enticing though charitable version, telling an interviewer, “Young Forepaugh is a smart trainer and will make a good one in time. He got his first instruction from me.”

  The article made no mention of another teenager, one who truly had paid close attention to Craven’s methods. Moses “Eph” Thompson had joined Forepaugh’s show when it passed through his hometown of Ypsilanti, Michigan, three years before, in May of 1873, just as he was turning fourteen. He had been tending the elephants but was African-American and had been mentioned in the press only as an unnamed “dusky attendant” and a “Negro tender.”

  Out of public view, Thompson demonstrated the smarts and instincts that would make him one of the greats. He likely was a major reason the elder Forepaugh felt able to let the high-priced Craven go in a Centennial year when his rival was sure to out-Barnum himself. Forepaugh was so famously cheap that he was known to lie to his employees about being unable to obtain butter in town and then rejoice in the cook tent at what he was saving by not serving any at the meal. He could only have been delighted to spare himself the expense of Craven while hyping his Addie as a boy wonder.

  Meanwhile
, the black and therefore underpaid Thompson almost certainly did most, if not all, of any subsequent training. That explains why everybody was barred from the facility where the elephants were housed and instructed, save for Thompson and Addie, the latter billed by his father’s show as “the youngest elephant trainer and performer in the world.”

  As Forepaugh made ready for the new 1876 season, his native city and home base was making far grander preparations for the nation’s one hundredth birthday. Philadelphia had been named the official site of America’s Centennial celebration and it would be hosting the country’s first world’s fair, rivaling those held in France and England with more than two hundred buildings spread over forty-nine acres. More than ten million people, or 20 percent of the country’s population, would be coming for what was to be less a commemoration of America’s glorious past than an exposition of a glorious present and a glimpse of a boundless future. The most popular attraction promised to be Machinery Hall, where President Ulysses Grant and the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, would each turn a valve setting in motion a huge steam engine designed by inventor George Corliss. That would, in turn, drive eight miles of shafting and animate hundreds of machines with what was then America’s most promising form of power, the steam that propelled the railroads and enabled factories to be built beyond any ready source of hydropower.

  “The American multitude rejoiced at its own success and the triumph of the great American inventor,” a newspaper would say of the moment when a crowd of 186,000 cheered the moment the huge engine was set in motion.

  The plans that would have mattered most to Forepaugh were those of Barnum as described in January 1876 in the New York Times.

  “With the advent of the Centennial Year, the great showman P. T. Barnum announces his intention to organize and exhibit the most colossal show ever collected,” the Times said. “He says he is about to produce the culminating show combination of his lifetime, and will exhibit them in the Centennial year to the greatest multitude of civilians and strangers that has ever on any one occasion or celebration been drawn together in the World’s history.”

  Forepaugh remained determined to best him. Forepaugh had the new elephant tricks and he got a replacement rhinoceros from Hamburg and just before the Fourth of July his show would begin erecting two big tops to Barnum’s one. But perhaps because of the exciting innovations of the exposition back in Philadelphia as well as his own fixation on fielding a show that outdid Barnum, Forepaugh failed to understand—as his rival so dramatically did—that the Centennial season was different, that it was a moment in history whose overriding passion was old-fashioned patriotism.

  The result was Forepaugh’s first losing season. Forepaugh decided upon a scheme for the season ahead to rouse the patriotic fervor that had been so manifest in Grand Rapids and all the other towns and cities. The inspiration for the scheme may well have been the little-noticed birth and presumptive death of the baby elephant Joe in St. Joseph. It would have been only natural for a true showman to ponder what he could do with such an event, particularly if an American-born baby survived. And, as Joe’s birth had received so little notice, another baby could certainly be presented as the first.

  Forepaugh most likely set the scheme in motion by buying the baby animal that would come to be called Topsy from the dealer in Hamburg, only now ensuring that his new purchase did not reach public notice, as had his replacement rhinoceros when it arrived in New York the previous February. He could hardly pass off the baby elephant due to arrive on this coming February—in 1877—as the first one to be born in America if anybody were to report seeing it come off a ship from some foreign land before its supposed birth date.

  Forepaugh succeeded in getting the baby into the country and to the show’s winter quarters undetected. He might even have pulled off the ruse, and Topsy might have gone down in history as the first American-born elephant, had he thought to use an animal dealer other than the same one used by Barnum. Forepaugh no doubt understood that when Barnum then offered $100,000 for an American-born elephant, he did so only because he knew the baby’s true origin and would not have to pay. What Forepaugh apparently failed to consider was that this same German animal dealer had a close personal relationship with Barnum. Forepaugh backed down so quickly it almost seemed he had learned never to humbug a humbugger.

  NINE

  Crooked Tale,

  Crooked Tail

  Little Topsy had been smuggled in with the intention of making her the biggest of draws, but as the 1877 season commenced she was reduced to fourth billing. The first again went to the replacement rhinoceros, the second to “the only living male hippopotamus in this country.”

  “It sweats blood!” the poster said of the hippo.

  Below that were the six trained adult elephants. Only then, in smaller type and prefaced by “Let the Ladies and Little Ones see it,” came what had been Forepaugh’s great hope.

  “There was born on the first of February, 1877 in our Great Menagerie a Beautiful Baby Elephant.”

  Forepaugh stuck by the lie just enough to save face but not so stridently as to draw another challenge from Barnum. The poster made no clamorous claims about the elephant being the first born in America. It only asserted in even smaller print underneath that the baby was “the first and only ever born in captivity outside the tropical zone.”

  The top of the poster announced that Forepaugh would at least be catching up with the Barnum show in traveling by rail rather than by wagon: “Three Separate Railway Trains! The World has never seen its equal.”

  Forepaugh had contracted with an Ohio firm to build thirty-seven railroad cars, but they were not completed at the season’s start and the show had to set off from Philadelphia in wagons for the first weeks. The baby walked along with five grown elephants through deepest night and, in the illusory freedom between towns, she almost could have been moving through darkness with her herd before the traumas of the capture and the ship. Only, her mother and aunts were gone and the herd’s pace was set not by the baby but by the captors.

  At the start of summer, the railroad cars were ready, each forty-two feet long, only two of them sleeping coaches, those largely reserved for management and performers. Laborers were to sleep where they could, the elephant tenders squeezed into a coffin-tight loft above their charges, but surely still finding this mode of travel considerably more comfortable than the wagons. Not so the elephants themselves, who no longer had those unfettered nighttime treks. They instead stood crammed together hour after hour, jolted, jarred, and jangled.

  Forepaugh had just started actually following his rival onto the rails when the continuing economic downturn after the Panic of 1873 prompted the railroad companies to cut their workers’ wages. The result was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, beginning on July 14 in West Virginia and soon shutting down two-thirds of the nation’s trackage. The strike turned violent, claiming more than one hundred lives.

  Forepaugh was delayed nine days between shows in Clinton, Iowa, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then another nine days between shows in Dubuque, Iowa, and Fremont, Nebraska, eternities by circus standards. He let go the majority of his performers and resolved to head west with a stripped-down show, away from the epicenter of the strike as well as the worst of the economic depression.

  Forepaugh had kept the baby elephant who was growing at the pound-a-day rate that earned her the name Topsy, translating to eighteen pounds during the two delays and another twenty-one pounds during a three-week ride west on the decade-old transcontinental railway.

  The train stopped in the broiling summer heat for two shows in Wyoming and another two in Utah, where the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad had been joined with a golden spike driven by Leland Stanford, the hammer and the spike wired so that each impact translated into a click on the telegraph system, the first event transmitted instantly and nationwide, ending with Morse c
ode for the single word DONE.

  The East and West Coasts were now joined into one great nation and the arrival on these tracks of even a stripped-down version of the Forepaugh show caused great excitement. The show represented another kind of national wealth, another kind of reward as it made four stops in Nevada, which was nearing the end of a gold and silver rush that had produced $700 million in precious metals. The parade drew a large and diverse crowd in Reno, then a booming mining town and long before it became dependent on divorce and gambling.

  “Not a few red men and a sprinkling of Chinamen completed the throng that lined our streets yesterday—and all because 4-Paw’s big ‘horse opera’ was here,” the Nevada State Journal reported, employing a phrase that would later be applied to Western serial movies. “When a circus ceases to draw, then comes the millennium, sure.”

  The five stops in California included a twelve-day stand in San Francisco. The show wintered in nearby Hayward. The baby was now two, around the age for her training to extend beyond responding to her name.

  Topsy’s schooling would no doubt have been predicated on blows and jabs had young Addie Forepaugh been the primary trainer as he was touted. He may never have actually studied Craven’s methods enough to discern the underlying principle and its effectiveness. He also may have simply enjoyed wielding the bull hook. He was by his own declaration an energetic practitioner of the traditional philosophy predicated on pain and fear.

  But the secret trainer was a true student of Craven. And the knowledge of how slaves of his parents’ generation had suffered may have made Eph Thompson all the more receptive to a radical philosophy based on gentleness.

  With the avowedly brutal Addie taking the credit, but the gentle Thompson most likely doing the actual training, the motivating principles would have been praise and rewards as Topsy learned that “Mile up” meant to move forward quickly, “Tail up!” meant to use her trunk to hold the tail of the elephant ahead of her in a procession, and “Det!” meant to stop.