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

by Michael Daly

  A grifter subsequently exacted revenge on the show’s chief of security.

  “Our efficient Pinkerton detective, Frank Hook, mourns the loss of an overcoat, which he has been unable to recover, not even with the assistance of the village constable.”

  The Forepaugh reputation for larceny lingered and when $1,600 went missing from a house while the show was in Marion, Kansas, it was held collectively to blame. The big surprise was that anybody in town had that much cash, for the area had fallen into the deep gloom of the ongoing economic downturn.

  Marion, KansasWednesday, August 30th

  We had a beautiful day here, but as the town is in the last stages of decay, owing to financial ruin brought about by the failure of its leading bank and the general business depression, our business was very bad.

  Only a meager crowd was on hand to witness what had been unprecedented for an elephant of any show.

  “In the elephant races today, Topsy stumbled and fell, turning a complete and artistic somersault that almost resembled a ‘flip-flap’ and throwing the rider fully 15 feet. No damage.”

  Arstingstall’s response is not reported but can well be imagined. A bit of what an elephant lover would consider justice came two days later.

  Wichita, KansasFriday, September 1st

  George Arstingstall made an aggravating mistake today in the cook tent. He saw a plate of butter in front of his plate, and thinking it to be cornstarch pudding, he sprinkled sugar over it, then gave it a liberal supply of milk, after which he took a still more liberal spoonful and placed it in his mouth. Immediately everybody was startled with a yell like a Comanche and such spitting and sputtering one never heard or saw before. It was an awful dose for the unfortunate Professor, for, confidentially, the cookhouse butter is something not to be mentioned.

  Despite the trainer’s harsh methods, the show ended the season with none of the elephant rampages of prior years. One reason may have been that Bailey had followed Forepaugh’s example in dealing with troublesome elephants and presented the rambunctious Gold Dust along with Duncan to the Washington Zoo. The zoo had no facilities for elephants and the two were initially kept tied to a tree and led down to Rock Creek once a day to drink and bathe and exercise. The treatment here was almost certainly gentler than with the show and both elephants remained generally well behaved. “Dunc” did have a bout of ill humor, likely the result of musth. He nonetheless became a particular favorite of the capital’s children.

  Up at the Central Park Zoo, Tip was confined in what was called “the elephant house” but was so cramped that his back brushed the roof and he was unable to raise his head fully. He did receive daily exercise under standing orders from Superintendent William Conklin, who was inclined toward the views of Stewart Craven and Eph Thompson.

  “As long as he was properly looked after, there was no danger of his doing any harm,” Conklin later said of Tip.

  The elephant keeper, William Snyder, did not much care for his charges and took an instant dislike to Tip in particular.

  “I knew he was wicked when I first took charge of him,” Snyder later said. “I guess Forepaugh was glad to get rid of the beast. . . . He should have been shot then, the wicked brute.”

  Save for the brief periods of exercise mandated over Snyder’s objections, Tip was kept shackled to the floor. A “martingale” chain girded his midsection and shorter chains extended from it to his tusks, further restricting his ability to lift or even turn his head. He was continually goaded and beaten and when he grew angry he was goaded and beaten some more.

  Tip was in the second year of such treatment when Snyder announced that the elephant had attempted to kill him with a swat of the trunk and an upraised foot.

  “When I recovered myself, I went back, made Tip lie down, put extra chains on him, and gave him a good beating,” Snyder told a reporter.

  The superintendent, Conklin, remained convinced that the problem was not the elephant, but the trainer. A showdown with Snyder loomed when Conklin was suddenly swept up in scandal. A llama had died of natural causes during a show at the Academy of Music and the animal proved to belong to the zoo. It turned out that Conklin had been renting out the zoo’s animals and using its facilities to his personal financial advantage.

  At hearings held by the Commission of Accounts, the most damning witness was none other than Snyder. He testified that he had twice been ordered by Conklin to take elephants to theatrical shows, one in New Jersey, the other in downtown Manhattan.

  “Mr. Conklin was to get fifty dollars a week,” Snyder reported of the Manhattan arrangement.

  Another witness alleged that Conklin’s wife had gone into business as an animal dealer, using the zoo to lodge her inventory, including as many as 125 monkeys. She diverted zoo meat to feed her carnivores and was said to have actually sold pigeons to Central Park.

  On the day Conklin’s wife was to take the stand, her doctor informed the commission she was too ill to testify. Conklin himself was said to be “among the temporarily missing.” He mailed in a one-sentence letter of resignation.

  Tip was never exercised again, spending nearly three years in uninterrupted confinement. Snyder was said to look the other way when boys fed Tip apples filled with pepper. Snyder was well aware that Tip had a phobia of rodents and he sometimes left a cage filled with rats in the stall.

  Snyder took the precaution of sawing off some twelve inches from each of Tip’s tusks as the cycle of torment and rage escalated.

  “He is the most vicious elephant I have ever seen and he has been getting worse all the time,” Snyder said. “He is a treacherous beast.”

  In the spring of 1894, Snyder announced that Tip had again tried to kill him, this time with the sawed-off tusks.

  “He ought to be killed before he does any more hurt,” Snyder said. “If he isn’t killed, he’ll kill me.”

  The New York Times described the incident as a “treacherous attack” by an “ungrateful pachyderm” on Snyder, who “had always treated him with great kindness, although Tip has the worst temper possessed by any elephant the keeper has ever had charge of.”

  The paper went on, “Now that Tip is in disgrace, Snyder acts no longer as his purveyor of good things and as his valet. A rake attached to a long pole cleans out his stall and pushes in his ordinary rations.”

  The reporter visited the elephant house and understandably failed to recognize Tip’s constant swaying as a sign of great stress. The reporter noted that Tip would go still when Snyder approached, watching the keeper intently with his “little yellow rheumy eyes.”

  The new superintendent, John Smith, referred the matter to the Board of Park Commissioners, whose members had received from Snyder sections of Tip’s sawn-off tusks as keepsakes. Smith echoed Snyder.

  “[Smith] recommended that the brute be killed at once,” the Times noted. “Commissioner Clausen said the fact that Tip had been chained to the floor in the pen for five years might account for his vicious disposition, but Superintendent Smith said it was unsafe to release the big brute from the chains.”

  The Times further reported: “The Commissioners were disinclined to have him destroyed as he was a great attraction in the menagerie, but they also considered that his skeleton would be a great exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History.”

  The commissioners put off the verdict for a week, ostensibly to give Tip time to improve his behavior. The Times headline read, “Tip Must Reform or Die—Central Park’s Big Elephant on Trial for His Life.”

  The board used the intervening days to consider how exactly Tip would best be killed. A colorful character known as Arizona Bill offered to kill Tip with one shot from his “unerring rifle.” Another proposal came from someone described only as “a representative of a power company,” almost certainly not the Westinghouse company. Westinghouse would hardly have gotten himse
lf involved in electrocuting animals after his adversary’s notorious experiments.

  And the proposal did not likely come from the company that had shed Edison’s name, as it was seeking to expand into the alternating current business and dispel talk of DANGER. The proposal more likely was relayed by an emissary from Edison himself, though he surely did not imagine he could change the outcome of the War of Currents even by killing something so large, by every measure, as an elephant whose fate had been on the front page for a week.

  But Edison had already been offered and then lost an opportunity to electrocute the elephant Chief back when he had imagined it might make a difference in his struggle with Westinghouse. He may have been seeking to vent via Tip the hurt and frustration and anger pent up in what Tate called “the solitude of his own mind.”

  And these internal roilings could only have been intensified as Westinghouse’s triumph at the Chicago exposition was now being followed by a second triumph in upstate New York, one that was sure to dramatize the insurmountable shortcomings of direct current. The success of the White City had convinced the Cataract Construction Company up at Niagara Falls to use an AC system, and it announced an international competition for the best plan. Westinghouse had suspected that it was just a trick to get a fortune in ideas for the price of a relatively paltry award. But when the firm now just named General Electric signed up to enter the contest, he apparently felt that he had to do the same if he was to have any hope of getting the contract for actually building and installing the generating system. Edison’s nemesis Coffin apparently sought to gain General Electric an edge with some nineteenth-century industrial espionage. A raid on his office produced a number of Westinghouse blueprints and estimates. He was said to have obtained them by bribing a Westinghouse draftsman and there was talk of an indictment.

  Then Cataract announced that it would not be using any of the contest entrants and would instead be doing the work itself with the help of an engineer named George Forbes. Westinghouse must have felt doubly stung for having gone against his initial instinct that he was being hustled. Edison, on his part, might have been doubly delighted.

  But the Niagara project proved to be beyond Forbes’s capabilities. The contract went to Westinghouse after all, the dynamos to be those designed by Tesla, who had spoken as a boy in Serbia of one day building a huge water wheel at Niagara Falls.

  All this culminated shortly before the emissary most likely from Edison proposed alternating current as the best way to send Tip the behemoth to “elephant heaven.”

  “Electricity, it is understood, is most favored by both the commissioners and the experts,” the New York Tribune reported.

  On the appointed day, May 8, 1894, the board reconvened. The secretary had drafted what was described as an indictment. Snyder was taken at his word, including his exaggerated accounting of Tip’s history of violence, saying the elephant had killed six men “(two at one time) and one boy.”

  The report went on to describe in detail the two supposed attempts to kill Snyder, who was termed “the best and most courageous of elephant men.” Bailey offered testimony via a telegram from Washington, where the Barnum & Bailey show was performing.

  “It has always been my opinion that Tip, the elephant, was dangerous to the public as well as his keeper. It seems to me the only safe way is to kill him, and the sooner the better. If he was mine, I would kill him before night.”

  The former superintendent, Conklin, emerged from among the temporarily missing to offer a lone authoritative voice of dissent and plead for Tip’s life. Conklin said Tip had killed not seven, but at most two, both in mitigating circumstances. Conklin urged the board to replace Snyder if he was unable to manage the elephant.

  “I would suggest ‘Eph’ Thompson, the colored animal trainer,” Conklin said. “The most successful trainer of elephants ever known.”

  The suggestion was not even considered before the president of the board called for a vote. The other three members answered in unison.

  “Kill him!”

  The only remaining question was how to do it. Snyder and others had pointed out a complication regarding electrocution.

  “Because we could not get near enough to him to attach the electrodes to him,” a board member noted.

  Snyder remained in favor of shooting, but there were worries about what might happen if Tip were only wounded. One citizen suggested affixing an explosive to his forehead.

  The board’s decision was reported in the morning Times:

  Tip Tried and Convicted

  The Central Park “Rogue” Will Be Executed Tomorrow—Poison Will End His Existence.

  By 5:00 a.m. the next day, more than five hundred people had gathered outside the elephant house. The crowd kept growing, extending up a hill. A sound arose that was seldom heard when the condemned was a fellow human. “The clamor of the men, women and children and many nursemaids against the sentence of death,” an observer wrote.

  A squad of police officers barred entrance to everyone save those who had received an official ticket.

  “Admit Bearer to Execution of Tip,” it read.

  Just after 6:00 a.m., the assistant superintendent of the zoo handed a large, hollowed-out carrot to a curator from the American Museum of Natural History. The curator inserted what was presumed to be a fatal dose of potassium cyanide and it was presented to Tip at 6:58 a.m. The elephant tucked the carrot into his mouth and the witnesses went silent, expecting that in just moments he would collapse in a heap.

  Instead, Tip let the partly chewed carrot spill from his mouth. The would-be executioners next tried a similarly poisoned apple, but Snyder had let youngsters offer him too many peppered ones. Tip cautiously sniffed the apple, rubbed it on the underside of his trunk, then set it down and stomped it. He ignored several subsequent carrots and apples as well as chunks of bread, though he did begin to show effects from however much poison he ingested in biting that first carrot. His eyes dimmed. His trunk drooped.

  “Tip is a pretty sick elephant,” a commissioner was heard to say.

  The elephant turned away from the men as far as his chains allowed and faced the back of the pen.

  “He is dying,” somebody said.

  A half hour later, Tip seemed to revive and he turned back with what was described as a “bland twinkle in his eye.” His trunk swung back and forth with “a jaunty air” as a team of four riflemen asked for permission to chalk a target on his forehead and shoot him.

  The ASPCA denied the request and the poisoning effort resumed. Snyder personally put a jumbo capsule of potassium cyanide into some wet bran and then retreated so as not to give alarm when it was presented to his nemesis.

  At 4:07 p.m., Tip set to eating what would later be called “the fatal temptation.” He was seized with spasms, and made a belching sound as if again trying desperately to bring up what he had just ingested.

  “He writhed as much as a monster his size can writhe,” the Times reported.

  Tip lifted his trunk to the height the low ceiling allowed and trumpeted his anguish before making a wild dash toward the rear of the pen with such furious power that he snapped all of the chains save one on a foreleg. The lone remaining restraint stretched taut and he seemed sure to burst through his wooden confinement and charge free into the lush, springtime greenness of the park beyond.

  The chain held. Tip suddenly seemed to lose all his strength and his legs buckled. Twelve minutes after he ate the bran and more than ten hours after being offered that first carrot, he made a final trumpeting sound that was described as faint and despairing.

  A more sympathetic Times called Tip an “enthralled monarch of the jungle, largest and most powerful of his herd, an elephantine colossus” who “ingloriously died because he trustingly ate a pan of poisoned bran.” The Times suggested that the outcome had been determined, as were many in the
city, by who had the greater influence with the powers that be.

  “He hated Snyder and Snyder hated him, and one or the other had to go,” the Times said. “Tip was the victim. The poor fellow had no ‘pull.’”

  Eight men with long knives worked through the night skinning the corpse for the museum. The eyes went to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. The University of Chicago sought the whole brain but settled for half, “to examine the cause of the wickedness which made the killing of the animal necessary.” The scientists did not seem to consider that the wickedness in question might have originated in the brains of their own species.

  Word of the execution reached the Forepaugh Show as it was traveling through Kentucky. The continuing economic depression had caused the show to downsize from three rings to one and dispense with historical battle reenactments, as well as replace the thrilling but pricey trick riding of the Wild Warrior Cossacks of the Czar with an economical “example of kindness in animal education.” This new money-saving feature involved only a horse and a pony supposedly trained by the methods of the late John Rarey, who had achieved worldwide fame as the original horse whisperer, applying principles similar to those of his fellow Ohioan Stewart Craven.

  Next on the program were the elephants. They remained the essence of the show after financial exigencies and the dazzling, futuristic competition of the White City caused the owner to abandon the usual aspirations to greatness, for a season, anyway. The show might not have been able to afford re-creating Custer’s Last Stand and it might not have set the sky aglow, but it still had Topsy leading the dance and crawling around the now single ring.

  This performance was to a significant degree the residual result of kindness in animal education as practiced by Craven and Thompson, though that was not mentioned in the program or the route book. The keepers themselves no doubt continued to believe that Topsy and her herd did as bid only under the perpetual threat of the hook. The audience assumed that the elephants were simply doing what good, sagacious elephants do, what made the show the show even as hard times caused it to abandon its usual hyperbole.