by Michael Daly
“I happened to be in a position where I could aid in the capture of the man,” he said. “I do not think that the American people would like me to make capital out of the unfortunate circumstances. I am no freak anyway. I do not want to be exhibited in all kinds of shows. I am glad that I was able to be of service to the country.”
Mindful of the success of Midway Day, the exposition’s organizers announced a New York State Day on October 9, followed by a Buffalo Day on October 19. Business remained so bad even the Trip to the Moon cut its admission in half.
With the hope of ending on a high, or at least higher, note, the organizers proclaimed that November 2, the final day of the fair, would be Farewell Day. The big official event in the Panathenaic stadium was filmed by the Edison crew as Sham Battle at the Pan-American Exposition.
“On the closing day of the Pan-American Exposition, Saturday, November 2nd, 1901, a sham battle took place at the Stadium on the Pan-American Exhibition grounds, between the six tribes of American Indians and the United States Infantry stationed at Buffalo,” the Edison film catalogue would report. “The scene is replete with charges and many hand-to-hand encounters. Most of the action took place close to our camera and the picture which we secured is excellent.”
The event featured Geronimo, who had been performing in smaller skirmishes thrice daily at the Indian Congress, the Native American concession. The sight of the former Apache war chief prompted cries of “Geronimo!” from the audience.
“Geronimo is always sure of a recall or an encore,” the local press reported.
After the battle, Geronimo and the others went about peacefully packing up for their departure. The crowd scattered into the grounds and many of the thousands who came to Farewell Day acted as if it were a mockery rather than a celebration. They grew ugly as all the Rainbow City’s promises of a bright and exciting future were ending with them returning to their everyday lives. Mobs erupted into a rampage more wantonly destructive than any elephant stampede.
A local newspaper reported:
People went mad. They were seized with the desire to destroy. Depredation and destruction were carried on in the boldest manner all along the Midway. Electric light bulbs were jerked from their posts and thousands of them were smashed on the ground. Some of the Midway restaurants were crushed into fragments under the pressure of the mob as if they were so much pasteboard. Windows were shattered and doors were kicked down. Policemen were pushed aside as if they were stuffed ornaments. The National Glass Exhibit was completely destroyed. Pabst’s Café was demolished and Cleopatra’s Needle was torn to the ground.
One exhibit that apparently escaped looting was a display of eleven baby incubators in actual use, premature human newborns proving to be a bigger draw than a mummified Native American papoose, and almost as big a draw as baby elephants. Also apparently untouched was the Tiffany’s display, which featured 270 different uses of elephant skin, including a $1,000 handbag. There was also a $300 wastebasket made from hollowing out an elephant foot.
At midnight, after the crowd’s fury was spent, the president of the exposition ceremoniously pushed a button to turn off the un-smashed lights. Then there was a residual glow and then darkness cloaked a desolate scene of destruction, disappointment, and debt.
In the middle of it all was Bostock and his menagerie, which had grown to include a large male elephant, Jumbo II, said to have fallen in love with the widowed Big Liz and to have surpassed her as the biggest in captivity. Bostock further reported that Jumbo II had served with the British army during the Abyssinian War in 1868 and had been decorated by Queen Victoria for valor, making him almost as big a hero as Parker. Bostock added that his acquisition of this distinguished pachyderm had the British people indignant “as they have not been since Barnum took the original Jumbo away from them.”
But his supposed war record accorded Jumbo II little license when he was alleged to have acted as badly as the thousands of humans who rioted around him. The elephant was said in one newspaper account to have wrapped his trunk around the leg of a trainer named Henry Mullin and smashed him repeatedly to the ground. The article reported that Bostock and several helpers had come running with pitchforks. It was noted that Jumbo II had not stomped on the man because the elephant’s legs were so restrictively chained he could raise his feet only inches. There was no indication why such restrictive fettering was necessary or whether it might have contributed to the elephant’s ill humor. Other press accounts alleged that Jumbo II had terrified a little girl by tearing her dress and had even gone so far as to knock Bostock down. Bostock had already nearly lost an arm when he was mauled by a Bengal tiger named Rajah, but that attack had been excused as just part of being a big cat.
In the case of Jumbo II, Bostock might have been more forgiving had he not already been in a rage over another of his star attractions, the diminutive thirty-one-year-old Chiquita, who had fallen for a teenage ticket taker in his employ. Bostock had fired him, but her suitor had simply taken a new job at the nearby Indian Congress, selling tickets to the crowd that cheered Geronimo three times daily. Bostock had sought to keep the smitten Chiquita from eloping by consigning her to her trailer and nailing the windows shut.
Bostock’s inability to control this tiny woman no doubt made him less able to bear defiance from the big elephant. The Animal King decided on a way to assert his supremacy and vent his rage as well as make up for declining revenue subsequent to the McKinley assassination. He announced that Jumbo II would be executed publicly in the exposition’s stadium at 2:30 p.m. two days after Farewell Day.
“That is, the public will be admitted upon payment of an admission fee,” a local newspaper noted.
Tickets would be going for fifty cents. There was still the question was exactly how Jumbo II would be put to death. The widely reported demise of Tip left many thinking that poison was too cruel as well as slower than an audience would desire. Bostock considered using the method that Bailey had employed so efficiently in the basement of Madison Square Garden.
“It is likely that Jumbo will be hanged, or choked to death with chains,” he said.
A Bostock aide was quoted saying, “We might shoot him with an elephant gun. . . . It is improbable that anyone around here has one.”
But Buffalo was the city of Southwick, the dentist who had performed the pioneering experiments dispatching dogs with electricity. Bostock finally announced that he would be employing the power of Niagara for one final spectacle in the exposition stadium, a method more in keeping with the modern spirit of the Electric City.
As in the days when humans were executed publicly, extra trains were available to convey the spectators on the appointed day. They sat shivering in the chilly fall air only to be told that the plans had changed. Mayor Conrad Diehl had telephoned Bostock from one of the city’s most exclusive clubs and said he was speaking on behalf of “society people.” Diehl argued that Buffalo’s reputation had suffered enough from the “financial unsuccess” of the exposition and the riot at the end of Farewell Day without such a ghoulish final note as the public electrocution of an elephant. The purpose of the exposition had been education, not eradication, particularly not as entertainment.
Bostock now announced to the paying crowd of a thousand that the public event had been canceled as the mayor asked and that they would get their money back as they exited the stadium. Some five hundred stayed, sitting in the cold and resisting repeated urgings to leave. Evening was approaching when they saw Jumbo II being led into the stadium flanked by two baby elephants whose purpose was apparently to pacify him. Jumbo II seemed the most passive and tranquil of creatures as he was guided onto a wooden platform and fettered in place. A harness was placed on him so that he had an electrode wrapped in wet cloth pressing against each shoulder.
Since the crowd was not going away, Bostock apparently figured he might as well play to it, and he made a little sp
eech.
“He told the crowd about Jumbo’s military career,” an observer would recount. “He recalled the long voyage from the kingdoms of Africa to the Niagara Frontier and how hard it had been for Jumbo to adjust to life along the Midway. These events, Bostock said, had completely altered Jumbo’s sanity. He had become a killer and death by electrocution was the only solution.”
Bostock then signaled to an electrician named Frank Graham, who threw a switch affixed to the stadium wall that was connected via insulated copper cables to the 2,200 volts still running into the stadium. Jumbo II just continued to swing his trunk idly and flap his ears in what was described as a “a good-natured sort of way.” He began to toy absently with a loose plank on the platform.
“He turned his head up and looked at the crowd as if to say, ‘I wonder what all the people are looking at?’” a reporter observed.
Bostock signaled to Graham, who threw the switch again, with no more effect on Jumbo II than if the power had been shut off along with the exposition’s lights. Tittering was heard in the stands and it spread until it grew to great gales of laughter, joined by catcalls and taunts aimed not at Jumbo II but at Bostock. The crowd followed as Jumbo II and the babies were led away.
“Jeering the executioner and cheering the elephant,” an observer noted.
Bostock was mortified and mystified, theorizing that the electrocution had been a failure because the elephant’s thick skin acted as an insulator. He allowed that he was not at all sure what to do with Jumbo II now, whether to attempt another method of execution or “try to reform him.”
Bostock set that concern aside when he returned from the botched execution to discover that in his absence Chiquita had managed to escape through a gap in the trailer wall and elope with her teenage ticket taker. Bostock immediately took the matter to court, charging her with breach of contract. Bostock abandoned the Cuban fiction and told the court via his lawyer that he had come upon Chiquita in Mexico and acquired her from her widowed and impoverished father.
“He has taken as much care of her as though she had been his own,” Bostock’s lawyer attested.
“Yes, he has taken as much care of her as he has of his elephants,” the ticket taker’s lawyer replied.
The court found for the ticket taker, but Bostock refrained from venting his fury with a second attempt to execute Jumbo II. His showman’s instinct no doubt told him that the electricity-resistant elephant would become a big attraction, which Jumbo II indeed proved to be when Bostock set off for other venues with his menagerie.
As for Edison’s crew, if it stayed in Buffalo after the sham battle to record what was to have been Jumbo II’s execution, no film was produced. Edison would not likely have distributed a film in which a jolt of alternating current failed to have the fatal effect he had predicted for even a creature as big as an elephant.
The Edison crew did film other elephants in the 1901 film Day at the Circus. The catalogue reports, “We present here a series of interesting pictures and show a number of scenes just as witnessed by a visitor to the Great Forepaugh & Sells Bros. combined four-ring circus. We begin by showing the complete circus parade as it takes place in the street. The first scene shows the parade coming down a broad asphalt avenue with park in background. Entire parade shows elephants, camels, band wagons, chariots, cages of animals, and full circus paraphernalia, making a most interesting subject.”
The 350 feet of film proceed to show “the assembly or grand entry, and includes the entrance into the arena of the elephants, chariots, wild animals, horses, camels, etc.” Topsy appears in both scenes, by now becoming known as one of the herd’s premier performers. The film ends before her big moment, when she carries trainer Bill Emery from the ring at the end of the act, he standing on her head, the big top erupting into applause that for her is just part of her condition.
TWENTY-FOUR
Topsy and the Tormentor
The Forepaugh & Sells Brothers elephants crossed the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan early on the morning of May 25, 1902. They were followed by the rest of the show and soon the canvas that had been taken down on Saturday night in Jersey City was raised in a lot at the corner of Halsey Street and Saratoga Avenue. The first performance of the weeklong stand was at 2:00 p.m. the next day.
Among those in attendance the following evening was James Fielding Blount. He had been a railway brakeman making use of Westinghouse’s life-saving invention before he became one of those “circus-crazy” souls who quit their everyday routines to follow a show from town to town. He had been rebuffed in his efforts to secure a position as a driver, likely because of a fondness for alcohol, which he demonstrated to a habitual extreme while watching the performance. He was warned to stay away from the animals.
At five-thirty the next morning, Blount slipped under the canvas of the menagerie tent with a large glass of whiskey in one hand and a half-smoked cigar in the other. An attendant woke and sleepily asked what he was doing.
“I just came in to say good morning to the elephants,” Blount replied.
“You better stay away from ’em,” the attendant said before dozing off again.
“Oh, don’t you bother about me,” Blount reportedly said. “They all know me. I was an elephant myself once.”
A staggering Blount made his way to the roped-off area at the center of the tent, where the elephants were tethered, some sleeping and still, while a few took a turn at keeping watch in the usual way of the herd. He apparently had learned to recognize the elephants by name.
“Good morning, Pete,” Blount said to the first elephant in the long line, holding out the glass of whiskey. “Have a drink!”
Pete liked booze as much as did the rest of the herd. He extended his trunk only for Blount to retract the glass and laugh. Blount repeated this a few times before finally letting Pete take the glass.
“Pete lifted the glass daintily and poured it into his mouth without spilling a drop,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported. “He then handed the glass back to Blount.”
Blount continued down the line, at one point steadying himself by grabbing a trunk. The glass still smelled strongly enough of whiskey for the elephants to reach out their trunks as he repeated the teasing, which now ended not with a drink but with nothing at all, making Blount laugh that much harder.
By one account, Topsy was the tenth elephant, by another she was the unlucky thirteenth. She had apparently been sleeping and was only half awake, swaying slightly at the start of another day of stressful captivity.
“Here, Topsy, wake up,” Blount said. “It’s morning. Have a drink!”
Blount slapped Topsy hard on the trunk. An attendant called out a warning for Blount to cease his teasing.
“Don’t bother yourself,” Blount said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Topsy raised her trunk slightly but did not reach out for the glass, either wise to the trick or simply sleepy. Blount apparently decided she was ignoring him and he threw sand in her face. He then stepped closer, holding out the glass. She finally reached with her trunk and he withdrew, raising the glass high. She kept reaching.
Here was this star elephant who always got a huge ovation at the end of the act while Blount sat anonymous in the crowd, unable to get even a lowly job as a driver. Blount is said to have jabbed the lit end of his half-smoked cigar into the extremely sensitive tip of Topsy’s trunk. His laughter turned to a cry as Topsy seized him about the waist and hoisted him high in the air. She then dashed him to the ground with a thud that one of the keepers heard from thirty feet away.
The next sound was described as “a crushing, crunching noise.” Topsy would be said to have brought her weight to bear with her forehead in one report, both knees in another, her right foot in the official coroner’s finding, which noted that Blount suffered a ruptured liver and multiple fractured ribs. Topsy used the same foot to pu
sh away Blount’s suddenly still form.
Superintendent William Emery was summoned and he found Blount to be beyond help. The trainer spoke sternly to Topsy for ten minutes as if she could understand every word. She made no effort to resist as he and his assistant placed double chains on all four of her feet.
“Emery says she knows just as well as a human being what she has done,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported. “She barely tasted the hay that was given her for breakfast and when an Eagle reporter saw her at ten o’clock she was standing very quietly with every appearance of sorrow and dejection.”
Both the Eagle and the Times reported that Topsy was slowly swaying as a photographer set up a camera but went stone still when Emery called out for her to cease. A press agent sought to prove she was no vicious beast by having her pose with three men on her back, then with Emery sitting on her head as she lay down. The press agent contrived to convey her size by standing behind her prone form. Only the top of his hat was visible.
The next day’s newspapers were almost uniformly sympathetic to Topsy, the New York Times saying she was “amiable as elephants go and more intelligent than most,” noting “she has never killed a man before.” The New York Tribune said much the same, suggesting the blame resided not with Topsy but with Blount.
“His death was due to his foolhardiness in tormenting the elephant,” the paper concluded.
Blount was identified by a $160 money order and letters from a sister found in his pocket. His body was shipped home to Indiana, and that seemed to be that as the show finished its Brooklyn run and Topsy and the other elephants walked back over the bridge. The show played Paterson, New Jersey, that Monday and then five New York State towns over the next five days, traveling 377 miles and arriving in Poughkeepsie on Sunday.
After Topsy was taken off the train, an assistant keeper had her wait for the rest of the elephants. A twenty-year-old local named Louis Dodero came out of the crowd that had gathered to watch the unloading. He had a stick in his hand and began to “tickle,” more likely poke, Topsy behind the ear.
