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

by Michael Daly

  Two people had been killed and thirty-three severely injured when a procession of towering tranquillity emerged from the chaos and wreckage.

  “And out of the ruin marched the herd of fourteen elephants to the train, as unconcerned as if nothing unusual had occurred.”

  The Forepaugh & Sells show managed to reach the next stand one hundred miles away in Manning, Iowa, by the following noon, though there was but one performance and that had to be in the menagerie tent.

  “Attendance very good,” noted the route book.

  Business in general was on the upswing, with the economy recovering from overspeculation thanks to the production of actual wealth. The route book noted the various towns’ individual contributions to the rising national prosperity. The circus proceeded in one three-day period from Wheeling, West Virginia, “a thriving city, with large iron and oil interests,” to Steubenville, Ohio, “large glass and iron interests,” to Beaver, Pennsylvania, which had “the largest tumbler factory in the world.”

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was even then renowned for its breweries.

  “The weather is warm, but oppression is avoided by internal application of the delicious beverage for which the city is noted.”

  The elephants generally shared a taste for alcoholic beverages but had also come to regard the smell of it on a keeper’s breath as a warning sign of a lowered threshold for punishment and a heightened penchant for brutality. That very well may have been part of the reason for an incident in the beer capital involving Topsy. She took exception to the ways of an assistant trainer.

  “Frank Bloomer, an elephant man, becomes the enemy of Topsy, and is thrown to the street with great force, breaking a shoulder blade, and inflicting injuries sufficient to lay him up in the emergency hospital.”

  The head elephant trainer was M. J. “Patsy” Meagher, who sometimes adopted the compound surname Forepaugh-Meagher, other times simply Forepaugh. He had started out as a clown and had taken Eph Thompson’s place in the boxing act with the elephant John L. Sullivan, though he adopted more of a traditional approach when he subsequently became an elephant trainer. That had predictable results after the 1899 season concluded. The show was at its winter quarters in Ohio when Meagher, aka “Patsy Forepaugh,” brought the elephants into the training ring for exercise.

  “Sid became unruly and the trainer jabbed the animal with his stick,” a newspaper reported, a stick being a bull hook. “Sid became furious and hurled the trainer to the ground with his trunk. The elephant then fell on his victim, piercing Meagher’s body with one of his tusks.”

  Meagher’s wounds proved fatal. Sid was placed in heavy chains and his tusks were sawed to nubs, but his life was spared. That may have been due to the interim rule of the assistant elephant superintendent William Badger, who went so far as to suggest Meagher had ultimately been responsible for his own demise.

  “[Meagher] was kind to [Sid] when he felt like being so, and when he was out of sorts he wasn’t,” Badger said. “No matter how I am feeling, I never lost my temper with Sid. I prefer to take it out of a human being.”

  Badger was of the Craven/Thompson school of kindness. He was also African-American, so he was not promoted to fill the superintendent spot. His tempering influence was eclipsed when the show instead brought in William Emery, who put his philosophy into action during the 1900 season’s first stand, at Madison Square Garden. The Barnum & Bailey show was in Europe, so the Forepaugh & Sells show had taken over its usual opening venue.

  On the last night of the two-week run, the generally well-behaved elephant Dick turned himself into an immovable object. The New York Times afterward reported that the sudden intransigence came when Dick was about to be led into the ring for the night’s performance and that he blocked the entrance to the pen, preventing the other elephants from being brought out. The circus route book would insist that the incident occurred after the performance, as the elephants were being led from the Garden for the trip to the next stand in Baltimore.

  “He had fallen in love with the Gotham city, and framed in his brutal mind a resolution to die rather than make another trip to the one-night stands,” the route book proposed.

  By both accounts, Dick resisted every effort to make him budge. Rope and tackle were fetched.

  “It was decided that Dick should move, alive if possible, dead if necessary,” the route book said. “In a few minutes, the great rope noose was around his neck, and to the block and tackle arranged on either side of the mammoth beast were stationed several hundred men, who were the ‘lord high executioners’ of the occasion.”

  The Times gave the total number of men as one hundred, not hundreds. They were reported to have pulled with all their might, but their straining had no apparent effect on Dick. Two elephants were brought up and attached to either end of the rope loop, just as young Forepaugh had done twelve years before when dispatching Chief. The result was the same. The Times reported that a crew of sixteen men worked half a day on the carcass.

  “It was found that there were 110 square feet of leather in his hide, 10 in his trunk, and 5 in his ears,” the Times said. “The hide is worth $15 a square foot, and is used in making pocketbooks, music rolls, and similar articles, while the intestines, of which there are 1,400 pounds, and the bones are also of commercial value.”

  The Carnegie Museum was said to be interested in purchasing the skeleton.

  “If the museum does not buy it, it will probably be sold in parts.”

  The Times suggested that Dick’s death had been the unintended result of the elephant’s own resistance. The headline read:

  Stubborn Elephant Dead

  Killed by Two Others at Madison Square Garden

  Refused to Move and Resort to a Block and Tackle

  Brought Him to an Untimely End.

  The show proceeded north through Bridgeport, Barnum’s hometown. The audience included two retired advocates of the bull hook, Arstingstall and “Elephant Bill” Newman, whose wife had employed a gentler, more matriarchal approach with remarkable results on the few occasions she was allowed in the ring.

  Forepaugh & Sells had recently acquired a three-year-old “baby” elephant who was now “christened” before a crowd of twelve thousand in Boston. The show then headed on to the Midwest, arriving in Duluth, Minnesota, on July 9, 1900. The route book reported a record turnout.

  “The biggest day’s business in year. Every seat and all standing room sold, and a string of folks went back to town, couldn’t get in.”

  The boomtown size of the crowd as Topsy once again led the quadrille reflected sudden prosperity brought by the discovery of astonishingly huge deposits of high-grade iron ore in northeastern Minnesota. The ore was so close to the surface that it could be scooped up and deposited directly onto a train, loading fifty tons on a car in three minutes, a single man with a steam shovel on the surface equaling the work of five hundred miners in other regions laboring with picks and shovels deep underground.

  “For this revolution in mining, we have, of course, to thank Nature first,” a contemporary local historian noted of this vast find in the Missabe mountain range. “Geology has done more to make it possible than the human inventor.”

  A biographer would write that upon seeing that the price of iron ore had fallen considerably below what he could ever hope to achieve by milling. Edison simply gave a laugh and said, “We might as well blow the whistle and close up shop.”

  Edison had compromised himself and poured most of his fortune and years of effort into the New Jersey iron ore project, yet he remained as outwardly serene as an elephant in a thunderstorm. Tate would write, “He knew that his failure was not due to any technical defects in his process but to conditions beyond his power to detect or anticipate. He was defeated by Nature when she prepared a rich and vast deposit of iron which required no milling. No personal element was involved.
There was no kidnapping and nothing to regret.”

  Edison mitigated some of his losses by adapting the ore-crushing machinery to the manufacture of cement, and there was still the revenue from his participation in entertainment, however reluctant.

  The silver dollar measure indicated that the future of movies lay in storytelling spiced by violence and/or sex and many, many more kisses. Edison remained the same person who had devoured every nonfiction volume in the library as a youngster, but in his whole life claimed to have read only one novel, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. He continued to say that film would become primarily an educational tool. He seems to have said nothing more about the deep hurt that could only have grown along with the ever-burgeoning electric revolution.

  Some of the independent local affiliates retained the Edison name even as they moved away from direct current orthodoxy. They clearly recognized the continuing value of association with the Wizard.

  One of the bigger such firms was the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn, which took over two smaller power firms and seemed close to securing a virtual monopoly in that borough. It was then challenged by a new firm called the Kings County Electric Light and Power Company, which had not yet finished building its first power plant but held the Brooklyn rights to Tesla’s system. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the rivalry as if the Wizard were involved and the War of Currents had not been decided in favor of Tesla and Westinghouse four years before. The paper seemed to imagine that Edison the inventor had some connection with the Brooklyn company that bore his name.

  “Brooklyn will soon be the scene of one of the greatest scientific and industrial battles of the age,” the paper said. “The genius of Tesla is to try conclusions with the wisdom and experience of Edison. This great struggle for supremacy in science and finance will have its seat of war right in Brooklyn.”

  This local struggle was in fact between two AC systems. The long-established Edison Electric Illuminating of Brooklyn appeared all but certain to prevail in January of 1898 as it put into operation a huge new plant in Bay Ridge that would produce the damnable current, the firm proving to be more adaptable than its namesake had been. But the only patents available to it were for a system less efficient and profitable than the Tesla system.

  As a result, the upstart Kings County company was able to underbid the Edison company for the municipal lighting contract. The somewhat secretive syndicate backing the Kings County company then proved able to muster enough money to take over the Edison company. The upstart simply bought all the stock of the near monopoly as part of a plan to become a monopoly itself and eventually join a larger monopoly encompassing all of New York. The result was a victory for what Thomas Edison had declared to be his least favorite type.

  “There was no title of reproach and contempt that he could confer on anyone more withering than that of speculator,” Tate would write.

  Now a vassal state rather than a kingdom, what was still called Edison Electric Illuminating of Brooklyn continued to operate the power plants it no longer owned, along with the lone one that Kings County was only now completing. Thomas Edison surely understood that the new owners were keeping his name on their subsidiary not as a testament but as a hedge against grumblings about trusts and monopolies and rates that would turn out to be not so low after all. The public would think it only natural that a company bearing the Wizard’s name would be the sole source of power. This also made the company the sole recipient of the profit. Not one of those silver dollars was going to Thomas Edison as the demand for electricity in Brooklyn and everywhere else kept growing as quickly as he had envisioned it would.

  As 1901 arrived, the syndicate behind the Kings County Electric Light and Power Company and therefore Edison Electric Illuminating of Brooklyn commissioned what were described as “the two biggest generating units in existence” for its Bay Ridge plant. The generators were, of course, designed by Westinghouse.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sid Sorrows,

  Topsy Traipses

  The Barnum show was still in Europe in 1901, so the Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Show again opened the season at Madison Square Garden. The elephant men were in the basement preparing the herd for the performance up in the main arena when a New York Times reporter appeared. The reporter asked their reaction to news that their fellow trainer Henry Huffman of the Wallace Circus had been killed by the elephant Big Charley in Peru, Indiana. Big Charley was said to have grabbed Huffman with his trunk and flung him into a stream, then held him underwater with a forefoot. Wallace Circus workers had fired on the elephant to no apparent effect before he tore through a fence into a large field, where he kept everyone at a prudent distance. Apples laced with strychnine were lobbed into his proximity and he finally ate one. An hour later, he keeled over and a rifle bullet finished him off in a coup de grâce.

  “I wouldn’t trust one of those damned hides,” a Forepaugh & Sells assistant trainer identified only as Mike now told the reporter. “They’re the trickiest beasts that live. They know more than all the rest of the animals in the circus put together. They’ll fool you for a long time, by allowing you to think they love you, when they are just waiting for the chance to put you out of business with a swing of that snaky snout of theirs.”

  Mike went on, “I told Huff a long time ago that beast would do him in the end, but Huff laughed at me. I long ago considered the elephant as my enemy, and I will always cling to that belief. I don’t ever expect to be killed by one of them for that reason. I hate them, though I’m a trainer. I rule them by brutality and fear, not by kindness.”

  Badger was also present and voiced a very different view, saying, “I don’t believe a word of it. The elephant is one of the most knowing and kindest beasts alive. There’s Big Sid, for instance. He killed poor Patsy Forepaugh a year ago. Why? Because Patsy didn’t understand him.”

  Badger made a statement that even an elephant lover might have found dubious.

  “Sid is sorry for having killed Patsy. He hasn’t forgot it. I bet when that old beast is a candidate for a permanent position in some museum, carrying a ton or two of sawdust under his hide, it will be through remorse for his killing Patsy.”

  The other trainers scoffed. Badger led them and the reporter to where Sid was leisurely munching hay. Badger hugged the elephant’s trunk, speaking to him in soothing tones. Badger then stepped back out of reach of the trunk.

  “This is the only time I’m afraid of Sid,” Badger told the others, “for you’ll see what I say burns deep in his hide. I’ve never learned whether it’s anger or real contrition which causes him to act so every time I mention Patsy.”

  The moment had come for a private demonstration that was in its own way more remarkable than all the public marvels of the circus, that surprised even the other trainers. Badger addressed the elephant.

  “Where’s Patsy, Sid?”

  The elephant’s ears perked alert.

  “Where’s Patsy?”

  The ears began to flap and Sid shuffled his feet as much as his shackles would allow. He began swinging his trunk above his head.

  “Sid killed Patsy, didn’t you, Sid?”

  The reporter noted that the elephant seemed to comprehend every word, straining against his chains near to the snapping point as Badger uttered the accusation again, and then again. Sid finally let out what was described as “a terrible roar that reverberated throughout the whole building.” The roar came anew each time Badger repeated Patsy’s name and the other elephants joined in. One of the managers hurried over from where he had been cueing performers for their entrances. He demanded the herd be hushed.

  “There, don’t you believe elephants have memory and that Sid is sorry for his act?” Badger asked his comrades once the elephants were finally quieted.

  Badger moved to convince anybody who still harbored doubts.

  “Now, wa
it. You’ll notice when the show is over upstairs and the people come down to see the elephants that Sid won’t eat,” he said. “I’ll bet that beast won’t touch a mouthful of food for the rest of the night.”

  Not long afterward, the showgoers appeared and swarmed around the elephants. Sid stood as if on some deserted field and ignored the crowd’s offerings of candy and peanuts. The other elephants, Topsy among them, reached with their trunks or simply opened their mouths wide to catch tossed treats.

  “But they hadn’t killed a man and they didn’t know remorse,” the reporter wrote. “Perhaps someday they will.”

  After a fortnight at Madison Square Garden, the show went from town to town through New England and the Midwest, finally heading south once more and arriving at Paris, Texas, at the end of September. One of the elephant keepers who was apparently more of Mike’s view than Badger’s aroused the ire of Topsy. She hoisted him with her trunk and dashed him to the ground. The keeper was hospitalized with three broken ribs and a battered face, but subsequent reports that the man died were apparently exaggerated. Reports that Topsy also killed a man in Waco seem to have been simply fabricated, for neither the town records nor the local newspaper seem to contain any mention of such an event when the circus passed through there.

  From Texas, the show proceeded on to Louisiana. The train carrying the animals was a mile outside Baton Rouge when it rear-ended a freight train, seriously injuring three men, wrecking four cars, and setting the elephants at liberty. Topsy and the others managed to stay ahead of their pursuers for several hours. They ranged free through the countryside, a sudden escape from captivity, a taste of what might have been had they never been captured.

  The reprieve ended when the elephants either chanced or were driven into Baton Rouge. A posse of citizens joined with the circus men to capture the herd. The elephants were conveniently already in the city for that night’s show, and soon Topsy was once again crawling around the ring.