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

by Michael Daly

  In the meantime, Topsy continued to grow like Topsy, a big toddler more than a baby as the 1878 season kicked off in Hayward with two rainy days at the end of March. The show undertook the longest “jump” of the season, 410 miles to San Bernardino made longer by a broken wheel on one of the sleeping cars. They no sooner finished the show there than they took down the 145-foot round top and the 80-foot menagerie tent and packed everything aboard the train again for an 84-mile jump to Anaheim. Next came the 27-mile jump to Los Angeles and the 167-mile jump to Bakersfield and so it went, six days a week for twenty-eight weeks, the shortest jump just a mile, the total distance traveled 9,048 miles. Topsy and the other elephants never walked much more than the distance from the train to the show grounds. Except when they were performing or parading, they were tethered either in the menagerie tent or aboard the rumbling, rattling train.

  The official “route book” documenting the season’s progress reported that the sideshow featured a bearded lady as well as the Smallest Man Alive and an “educated hog.” The main program began with the “grand opening pageant,” which included Topsy as well as the five grown elephants, along with “camels, comic masqueraders, and mounted knights and ladies.” Then came “exercises with cannonballs” and the “principal act of polite equestrians,” followed by Hector the riding canine, an educated Turkish stallion, and the Boneless Wonder, as well as the Enchanted Barrel, spun and flipped by Louis Leslie, “the equilibrist king and foot juggler of America.” There were also various acrobats and clowns, riding acts, and a woman who walked a stretch of telegraph wire, and the act that made the circus the circus, the act Topsy would soon join, “the wonderful school of highly educated performing elephants, five in number, introduced by their trainer, Master Addie Forepaugh.” A highlight of the season came on May 3 in Colfax, California, when an acrobat bounded off a springboard to manage a double somersault over the quintet of grown elephants.

  The route book makes no explicit reference to Topsy, though a poster did mention midway down a “Baby Elephant ‘Chicago,’” the temporary name change apparently intended to drum up business in the biggest scheduled stop in the Midwest. The birthplace was again given as Germantown, Pennsylvania, but the birth date was for some reason changed from February 1 to February 22 of 1877, even though this was nearly three weeks after the elder Forepaugh had announced the birth. The high hopes that had accompanied that scheme were now dashed, but with the depression ending and Barnum presenting no direct competition on Forepaugh’s chosen route, the show prospered as it headed east.

  Forepaugh invested his continuing profits into rebuilding his show with the perpetual goal of making it greater than the one that billed itself “The Greatest.” He acquired four more elephants for a total of ten by the start of the 1879 season. His show seemed anyone’s equal or more as it opened in Louisville, Kentucky, and proceeded through that state, then Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, arriving in Flint on the Fourth of July.

  The Flint appearance should have been all the more memorable for coinciding with the nation’s 103rd birthday, but Forepaugh had been preceded into the city the month before by a show that displayed a new marvel, one that spoke of a future that was brighter than what was immediately foreseen at the Centennial fair just three years past. Whatever marvels appeared in the Forepaugh big top were illuminated only by the usual candles, whereas Cooper & Bailey’s Great London Circus had become the first to go electric, employing the super-bright arc lights developed by Ohio inventor Charles Brush.

  This Fourth of July was also the thirty-second birthday of the Cooper & Bailey show’s dominant partner, and, with the help of the light generated by the arc between two electrodes, his life was promising to become another great American success story. James Anthony Bailey had been born James Anthony McGuiness in Michigan. He had been orphaned as a young child and consigned to a cruel guardian.

  “On the slightest provocation I was whipped,” Bailey would later say. “I was kept working so hard that I was always late at school, so I was continually being whipped by the teacher and kept after school. Then for being late coming home, I was whipped again. I stood that until I was nearly thirteen years old.”

  Barefoot and with no possessions other than a jackknife with a broken blade, he had begun walking.

  “I remember well now the morning that I started down the country road, determined never to return except as my own master,” he later said.

  By his own account, he had been working as a $3.25-a-month farmhand, “very hard work for a small boy,” when a circus passed through. He had joined the other local boys in posting bills in exchange for a ticket and had met an advance agent named Fred Harrison Bailey, nephew of Hack Bailey of the earliest days of elephants in America. The agent had been impressed enough by the boy to take him on as a kind of apprentice.

  The boy had assumed his mentor’s surname and as James Bailey had become an advance agent himself at sixteen. He had been barely into his twenties when he invested his savings in the Hemmings, Cooper & Whitby circus. Whitby had been fatally shot during a fracas at the entrance to the big top during a performance in Louisiana, and Bailey had bought his interest. Richard Hemmings had then departed and the circus had gone to Australia as Cooper & Bailey. The trip had been a financial disappointment, but Cooper & Bailey was still able to acquire the Great London Show upon its return. Its luck took a turn toward golden when it chanced to pass through Cleveland that April just as the inventor Brush was demonstrating his new sensation by lighting the city’s central square. The event was accompanied by band music and an artillery salute and a roaring crowd right out of a showman’s dream.

  Cooper & Bailey continued on, having acquired exclusive rights to the Brush system. And with electricity provided by a steam-driven generator, the show was able to re-create the excitement inside its big top in Flint, dazzling the audience even before the first act took to the ring. The Cooper & Bailey 1879 route book noted of electric light, “It was thought at first it would prove a failure, but its success as a special feature of the show has been too great to require further comment.”

  However superior the Forepaugh show was the following month, the relative dimness of candles was more suited to the eyesight of elephants than that of humans. Forepaugh had been outdone by a rival show that had seemed a minor worry. And with the rights to the Brush system taken, the best Forepaugh could do was contract a Detroit engineer to provide an inferior arc lamp system for the following season.

  Meanwhile, Forepaugh had the engineer hoist a sample up one of the center poles during a two-day stand in Detroit, so his show could at least join the ranks of those that had exhibited an electric light.

  Onetime Forepaugh partner Dan Rice was touring the same part of the country with a much more modest show that traveled by steamboat. He responded to the Cooper & Bailey sensation with a variation of an old ploy by which a circus would precede a rival’s route with posters and flyers saying the other show was carrying a deadly contagion. Rice’s circulars began:

  The public are now by this information made aware that a show called Cooper & Bailey’s Great London Circus . . . have for an attraction the Electric Light. It draws many people to see it regardless of what danger they are rushing into. I regard it as a duty that I owe to the public to inform them what I know about it.

  The circular went on to say that some time before, Rice had himself introduced an electric light produced by a man named Lamon Rosel, who seems to have been entirely fictitious.

  He in a short time died from the effects of the chemicals that he created the light with. Many of my troupe took sick and one member, James O’Connell, who had weak lungs, died in a short space of time after the light was introduced; we could not account for it for a long time, but hearing so many complaining that the lights affected their eyes, caused many to grow sick and others to complain of dizziness in the head, I gave up the continuance of the scheme, although
it was very attractive.

  Years went—at last one Edison appears as the inventor of the new and powerful light. The London Show gets the exclusive right of using it for a time with their show.

  The circular was referring to the great Thomas Alva Edison, the homeschooled genius who boasted of having read every nonfiction tome in the Detroit Public Library as a lad and who had begun his experiments in a railroad mail car while he worked as a twelve-year-old “train boy” hawking snacks and a newspaper he published himself. He had gone largely deaf around that time, perhaps as a result of scarlet fever as a younger child or because of persistent ear infections. He would initially attribute the hearing loss to being boxed in the ears by a conductor. He would later say the conductor hoisted him by his ears. He would insist that he was grateful for the result because it “saved me from small talk” and freed him to think. His ponderings had produced inventions ranging from a rat paralyzer that electrocuted rodents to a stock ticker to a phonograph by which this hearing-impaired inventor allowed the world to preserve and listen to sounds. But in fact he had nothing to do with Brush or the system acquired by Cooper & Bailey’s Great London Circus.

  Rice may have assumed otherwise after an April article in the New York Herald headlined “The Triumph of the Electric Light” reported that Edison had developed a revolutionary incandescent bulb. The Edison report was itself a bit of showman humbug, for the inventor had announced his discovery when he was still months away from actually finding a practical filament. He had, in his words, “ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material,” experimenting with “no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths,” ranging from cedar to bamboo to exotic tropical plants.

  Rice’s circular continued:

  In Chicago and other cities where the Great London shows have exhibited it is talked of as the most brilliant light they ever imagined possible to create, but it hurt the eyes; also many say they have not seen a well day since the exhibition. Persons predisposed to pulmonary complaints it will shorten their days and in many cases it affects the tender brain of children. Look at their street parade, but don’t get near the light at night or any other time.

  The Public’s Servant,

  Dan Rice

  P. S.—This is not done to impair the patronage of the London Circus. Only to put the public on their guard; this much I will say, that from reports they have a very good show.

  The electric light soon ceased to be a primary worry for Rice after a fire swept through his steamboat, destroying all his show’s equipment as well as its animals, save for Excelsior, a blind trick horse that managed to swim to safety.

  Meanwhile, when taking over the Great London Show, Cooper & Bailey had acquired the elephants originally trained by Stewart Craven. Bailey now hired Craven and the reunification of the trainer and the elephants resulted in a sensation worthy of the dazzling electric light.

  “They are so superior to anything of the kind yet seen, having a military drill, a pyramid, a tight-rope walker, a clown elephant,” Craven later said.

  Craven’s kind ways had succeeded in again making Hebe feel secure enough and sufficiently at ease to mate, the male being either Mandarin, as was likely before, or Basil, as Craven’s son Charles would later report. Craven began to suspect the result more than a year afterward, when the elephants were performing a pyramid on soft ground after a rain. Hebe was on top and she seemed about to fall.

  “The other elephants, seeing her danger, came to her aid and eased her fall to the ground so that she escaped uninjured,” Craven recalled.

  Craven had noted long before that elephants are highly protective of each other, but they seemed especially so with Hebe. He came to conclude that they must have sensed her particular condition, which became unmistakable even to the dimmest of humans at 2:30 a.m. on March 10, 1880.

  When the moment arrived in the Cooper & Bailey show’s winter quarters, the other elephants raised their trunks and began to trumpet loudly, by one written account “as though they could not make noise enough and never would get through rejoicing.” Hebe broke free of her chains immediately after giving birth and newspapers described her tossing her newborn twenty yards, then charging a woodstove, “nearly demolishing” it. Another eyewitness account reported that Hebe threw the woodstove, not the newborn, and for a distance of twenty-five feet, ignoring the burns on her trunk for the sake of clearing a possible hazard for her newborn. The younger Craven said that Hebe then began to nudge the 214-pound baby with her trunk, coaxing it to stand as the other elephants tore free of their own chains and gathered protectively around, just as the herd must have at Topsy’s birth. The trumpeting of this captive herd was joined by the roars and yowls of the big cats in the menagerie.

  “It was the most awesome sight combined with terrific wild animal sounds that even to this time ring in my ears,” Craven’s son would recall years later.

  The elder Craven’s observation of Hebe in the immediate aftermath confirmed his view of the basic nature of elephants.

  “She displayed a vast fund of motherly affection and solicitude,” he said.

  The baby was a girl and she was immediately named Columbia, as befitted an animal touted as the first native born, the short-lived baby Joe by the same mother apparently forgotten. A crowd of hundreds soon gathered, watching the newborn venture from under Hebe’s legs and settle into a small pile of straw at the edge of a circle that the mother had made on the dirt floor with her repetitive pacing. The baby curled so that the soles of her forefeet almost met those of her hind feet and tucked her head and trunk into her chest.

  “For the time being forgetful of its troubles,” a reporter wrote. “The mother kept walking around and sniffing at it with her trunk until, finding it fast asleep, turned away and began to nibble at her hay. Meantime, if anyone would pass near the baby she would turn toward it and throw out her trunk as a sort of guard. The baby slept very sound for over half an hour, the only sign of life visible about it being the rising and falling of its side in its breathing. Meanwhile, the stable was full of visitors, who were anxious to see her babyship awake.”

  The baby began to stir, then raised her head, her mouth opening expectantly. The excited onlookers drew closer and watched as Hebe wrapped her trunk around the baby’s middle and lifted her to her feet.

  “As for the rest, the younger elephant seemed to understand well enough what to do. It staggered up, shook itself a little, gaped again, then waddled over and got directly under its mother’s legs and began to suckle, curling its trunk up over its head and using its lips.”

  When the baby’s hunger was abated, she broke away and started toward the keepers, evidencing “a disposition to make friends with anybody or everybody,” her small black eyes “twinkling with something of the playfulness of a kitten.” Had this been in the wild such as at Topsy’s birth, the mother would no doubt have happily allowed the baby to play in the equally secure company of her aunts and siblings. Humans were another matter. The mother immediately reached out with her trunk and drew the baby back between her legs.

  The baby made more attempts at stealing away and would be on the point of getting beyond the reach of its mother when the latter’s trunk would interpose like an iron barrier and the little one would find itself unceremoniously dragged back again. Thus it was all the time during the baby’s wakeful hours.

  The mother was firm, but unfailingly gentle.

  “In these strokes of maternal policy, the old elephant was always careful of the little one.”

  Craven would have been right to see a confirmation of his kindness philosophy as practiced by the elephants themselves. The reporter concluded that the mother’s actions “show strikingly the strong affection this species of animal has for its young.” The reporter quoted one of the keepers as saying, “If that baby elephant was to die I do believe it would kill the mother, too.”

  Nob
ody seemed to reflect on the trauma that must have resulted when a baby such as Topsy was born in the wild and was suddenly torn from its mother. What had not been forgotten about Topsy was Barnum’s offer of $100,000 for an actual American-born baby after Forepaugh’s attempted fraud three years before.

  Cooper & Bailey now had the genuine article and moved to make the baby an even greater triumph than the electric light. The show began by declining Barnum’s offer as if it had been made to them.

  “Its owner says he wouldn’t take $100,000 for it,” the Chester Daily Times reported three days after the birth.

  Forepaugh must have looked on with vying measures of satisfaction, fury, and fear as Cooper & Bailey and the little Columbia followed Barnum through New England. The possessors of a genuine American-born elephant outdrew Barnum in eight cities even though he went first.

  “Conventional wisdom dictated that the first show in a locale would outdraw the second, but not this time, even in Barnum’s hometown of Bridgeport,” the circus historian Fred Pfening III later wrote. “The infant pachyderm proved to be a tremendous money getter.”

  In a July interview, Barnum told a reporter that he had no doubt this American-born elephant was genuine. Barnum added, “I wish it wasn’t. I should be tens of thousands of dollars better off. A full-grown elephant brings $6,000, but I offered the London Circus Company $100,000 for the mother elephant and baby and it would have been worth twice that to me. . . . It is wonderful how women flock to see that baby elephant.”

  Cooper & Bailey printed up a poster showing a telegram that Barnum purportedly sent saying, “Will give $100,000 for your baby elephant. Must have it.” The poster also showed Cooper & Bailey’s purported reply: “Will not sell at any price.”