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

by Michael Daly

  The form kept coming. The fishermen kept rowing, but the form stayed right behind them the whole desperate way to shore. The moment the bow touched sand, the men scrambled onto Midland Beach. The form lumbered out of the water after them and only then did they realize what it was.

  “A tame-looking, gentle-mannered creature that was neither whale nor sea serpent, but about the gentlest elephant that ever went astray in New York,” the New York Times would report.

  The men and the dripping elephant stood facing each other. Elephants had lost much of their novelty in the 109 years since the first one arrived in America on a ship sailing past this very beach on the way into New York Harbor. The larger zoos and even the more modest circuses had at least one. Audiences had grown accustomed to seeing the creatures perform tricks which were once considered marvels and made their trainers celebrities.

  Here was a true marvel, apparently undertaken not at the command of a trainer, but of the elephant’s own volition, a feat so inexplicable as to outdo anything performed under a big top. And it was made all the more astonishing by the mystery of where this creature had begun the big swim, with any immediate possibility seeming beyond what might be expected of so large an animal. The elephant almost could have just materialized out of the sea, spirit turned to matter.

  Two other fishermen happened along and got a shock of their own. They quickly recovered their wits enough to fetch a rope, fashioning it into an outsize lasso. The elephant remained impassive on the sand as the four eventually overcame the complication of the trunk and got a loop around its neck.

  The men pulled on the rope, but they had to understand that there was no forcing a creature this size. The elephant did not so much obey as acquiesce, coming along only because that was what the animal was willing to do. Krissler and the others proceeded from the beach, the latest men to discover that an elephant’s amble looks slow until you try to keep up with it. They walked double-time to Adolf Eberle’s Speedway Inn, a hangout for aficionados of the new sport of automobile racing.

  The elephant was in the carriage shed when the police arrived and led “it” to the mounted unit’s stable in the village of New Dorp. The elephant was if anything more docile than the horses, which were put to daily service with saddles and bridles and reins.

  An officer logged the elephant in the station house blotter, the chronicle of the cops’ efforts to keep the local manifestations of their own species within bounds. One thing they knew for sure was that the elephant did not reside around there.

  “Vagrant,” the officer wrote.

  As word spread, a crowd of several hundred gathered outside the station to see the swimming leviathan who had appeared so mysteriously from the sea. The officers turned giddy at hosting one of the world’s wows rather than just another of its woes. They delighted in escorting into the stable all those who asked. The visitors stood mesmerized as they peered through the bars at what was pronounced “the wonderful prisoner.”

  The answer to the big question of where the elephant had started her swim came at 7:30 p.m., with the arrival of a delegation from Brooklyn. Pete Barlow, a onetime bareback rider who was becoming known as the Coney Island Elephant Man, was accompanied by two fellows described in news reports only as “Cingalese.”

  Barlow said the elephant was a female named Fanny. She was one of six Indian elephants at what had become America’s new amusement sensation, Luna Park. The attractions there included a variation on Shoot the Chutes, in which the elephants whooshed down a water slide. Elephants also gave ten-cent rides to children.

  A trio of heretofore docile elephants had escaped three days before, but two had been quickly recaptured. Fanny had somehow managed to remain at extra-large, making her way to the beach after midnight Saturday without raising an alarm. She had lumbered into the water with no discernible lights or shoreline before her.

  Barlow would have known from the lagoon at the bottom of Shoot the Chutes that elephants are not averse to splashing around. He would have noted that they move through the water with remarkable grace and surprising ease, their lumbering bulk turned to energizing buoyancy, their legs churning with intuitive efficiency, their trunks raised as if originally meant to be snorkels.

  And Barlow may have heard seafarers talk of the elephants who swim improbable distances among the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. But the Andaman elephants swim in groups from one island to another. Fanny was solitary as no female of her species seeks to be save for in the most extreme circumstances. Her destination could not have been more definite than a smudge of shoreline she had glimpsed in daytime.

  She may simply have been desperate to get away, to be anywhere but there. Or perhaps she was seeking to paddle against the currents of time, through memories triggered by the scent of the sea, to before she landed in America, before the cramped and harrowing voyage, before being brought down to the docks of her native shores, before being prodded along the path leading from the forest, before the first beating, before the terror of being torn from mother and herd.

  She had swum at least four miles into the darkness and fog when she heard the fishermen’s voices carry across the water. She may have become so tired and lost and solitary that she headed toward anything that might lead her to land.

  She would herself be a lifelong memory for all who saw her standing in the police stable, seemingly serene despite the hubbub and attention. Even with the immediate mystery solved, there remained the question of what exactly had spurred her to undertake this feat, which far outdid what even an elephant man might have expected and which topped with the force of her own, surprisingly free will anything she had ever done at someone’s command. She had not likely been seeking simply to make a point about the spirit of even a long subjugated elephant, though made it she had.

  She certainly had not lost her appetite. She was consuming hay and feed at such a rate that the police captain was growing progressively less gleeful to have her there. He suggested that Barlow move her immediately.

  The elephant trainer prepared to lead Fanny off toward the ferry at the tip of the island, but the captain had a policeman’s understanding that she could just as easily decide not to be so well behaved. He insisted that such a beast must be caged before being transported along the roads and through the villages.

  No wagon of adequate size was immediately available, and Barlow had to summon one from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. Fanny’s appetite did not abate during the protracted wait and the captain reconsidered. He decreed that Barlow could meet the wagon on the way.

  Barlow signed what was described as “an elaborate receipt” and started off with Fanny, accompanied by a big crowd.

  Five miles on, Fanny suddenly stopped and refused to budge. Barlow theorized aloud that she was holding out for her favorite inducement, but vowed he would get her going without it.

  “He failed entirely,” noted a reporter who had come not at the urging of some press agent but because this was actual news.

  The eminent trainer finally relented and gave the elephant what he termed “a highball.”

  “It consisted of a stiff quart of whiskey,” a newspaper noted. “Fanny smacked her lips and started again.”

  Another mile farther on they met the wagon. A thousand onlookers watched Barlow and the Cingalese men fashion a ramp at the back by setting three planks atop a bale of hay. Fanny again refused to budge despite all cajoling.

  The men finally removed the planks and sought to use just the bale as a step up. Fanny began to munch on the hay and Barlow diverted her with a quart of apples, which seemed to have a soothing effect. She finally stepped on what remained of the bale and entered the back of the wagon. Her fore and hind legs were secured with chains.

  At the St. George Ferry landing, the wagon pulled up among a dozen automobiles whose sputtering engines and tooting horns clearly annoyed Fanny. She again sounded her J
udgment Day trumpet, with a furious insistence. She persisted as the horses pulled the wagon to the middle of the ferry, directly behind an auto whose engine was kept running.

  So many passengers pressed around the wagon to catch a glimpse of the great swimming elephant that Barlow and his helpers had to push them back. Fanny continued trumpeting and he administered “a sedative,” a quart of whiskey heavily laced with cocaine. She briefly ceased to be bothered by the automobiles or the gawkers or anything else.

  The jolt of the boat nosing into the slip at the tip of Manhattan roused Fanny to raise her trunk and renew her loud protests. This caused one of the horses drawing the wagon to rear and calamity threatened as it sought to bolt. The men managed to get the horse under control and the wagon carried Fanny to teeming South Street, there to await the arrival of a Brooklyn-bound ferry. Never ones to miss an advertising opportunity, the owners of Luna Park had arranged for signs to be affixed to the side of the wagon describing Fanny’s feat and where she was bound.

  Her continued trumpeting drew still more gawkers. Barlow and his helpers shooed away those who sought to feed her. Some lobbed in paper bags of peanuts, which Fanny quickly consumed.

  The trumpeting ceased as the wagon trundled her onto a ferry. She was walked across Brooklyn, arriving without incident at Coney Island and the amusement park that exceeded the imaginings of everybody but its conceivers.

  Luna Park had opened May of 1903, just as had been promised by the banner appearing in the film of Topsy’s execution, when the grounds had been little more than piles of lumber and mounds of excavated dirt. The slogan from the banner was now emblazoned on a big arch over the entrance.

  “The Heart of Coney Island.”

  Beyond the arch shone what the New York Times termed “a realm of fairy romance,” the fantastic spires and colonnades and promenades lit with 122,000 lights powered by the big Westinghouse generators. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky had exulted, “With the advent of night, a fantastic city all of a sudden rises from the ocean into the sky.”

  At the lagoon where the execution platform had been built now stood a two-hundred-foot electric tower from which the great Cameroni slid down on a wire by his teeth, just as he had on Midway Day in Buffalo. Every day was Midway Day in Luna Park. It was also circus day, with two rings at the base of the tower offering twice daily what had once been the sole escape into the fantastic for much of a nation busy building a new reality. These brief performances were now almost lost in the perpetual plentitude of this whole other reality that was termed “the domain of an unknown world.”

  What Thompson called the Biggest Playground on Earth of course included the Trip to the Moon, though the voyage did not seem so extraordinary when starting out from so astonishing a realm. There had been one disappointing feature in this waking dream’s first season, a creature described as “a sad and pensive camel” that fulfilled what was to have been one of Topsy’s roles, giving rides to children.

  The film of Topsy’s execution was absent from the offerings on the rows of individual viewing machines arrayed beyond the Trip to the Moon. Luna Park did not have kinetoscopes but simpler and cheaper peephole viewers developed by a partnership that included an Edison engineer who had set out on his own. These coin-operated machines marketed by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company showed individual viewers not film, but a series of photos arranged as a kind of mechanical flipbook.

  No doubt some of the visitors had seen the film elsewhere on Edison devices. It had been advertised in the New York Clipper as “ELECTROCUTION OF AN ELEPHANT” just thirteen days after the execution and listed in a subsequent catalogue for Edison new releases. The catalogue description read:

  Topsy, the famous “Baby Elephant,” was electrocuted at Coney Island on January 4, 1903. We secured an excellent picture of the execution. The scene opens with keeper leading Topsy to the place of execution. After copper plates or electrodes were fastened to her feet 6,600 volts of electricity were turned on. The elephant is seen to become rigid, throwing her trunk in the air, and then is completely enveloped in smoke from the burning electrodes. The current is turned off and she falls foward to the ground dead.

  When the film was screened, the opening title card read “ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT,” with no attempt to brand it as “Westinghousing.” There was a lone name directly beneath the title, the name so all-important to the Wizard:

  Thomas A. Edison

  Attendance on opening day at Luna Park had been 40,000 and on that first Fourth of July it had jumped to 140,000 paying customers seeking refuge not just from the summer heat but also from workaday existence itself. Some of the profits went into acquiring four new elephants and hiring an actual trainer. Thompson and Dundy had by then become known to be “almost foolishly fond” of elephants. Thompson’s office chair covered with elephant hide was seen as evidence of this fondness.

  Edison’s movie crew returned to make Elephants Shooting the Chutes at Luna Park. The film was summarized in the catalogue:

  A huge elephant stands at the top of the chutes and prepares for his trip. At his back is another elephant who starts his companion. The huge animal assumes a sitting position as he leaves the top and like a flash slides down the steep incline into the water. He strikes the water with a tremendous splash, remains under the water for a short time, enjoying his cool bath. It takes considerable coaxing on the part of his Arabian keeper to get him to come out of the water.

  That film was followed by Elephants Shooting the Chutes Luna Park No. 2. These exhibitions by living elephants appear to have been more popular in the movie houses and with the kinetoscopes than the execution, which did not seem to rouse the same morbid fascination as the prospect of actually seeing a killing live. None of the “actuality” films were as big a hit as some of the fictional narratives, which offered another kind of escape that was in some ways more complete than that offered by Luna Park. The Wizard’s big hits included such entertainments as The Great Train Robbery. That and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the seventh scene of which featured the character for whom the crooked-tailed elephant had been named.

  On the wintry night of February 10, 1904, Anthony Pucciani awoke in the workmen’s quarters at the wildly successful Luna Park to behold what he would describe as the ghost of the elephant who had been electrocuted the year before. The immigrant laborer would report that the big astral form stood over him with her feet set wide apart, sparks issuing from her trunk, her eyes glowing brightly like blown coals. His response was to faint.

  Another laborer would say that he also saw the ghost of Topsy and was temporarily paralyzed by the sight. He said the fiery eyes dimmed as the elephant departed, her shrill trumpeting fading into the sounds made by the wind whistling through the dark and deserted park.

  A third man, a frankfurter vendor, would report seeing the ghost doing acrobatics on a tightrope stretched between the Shoot the Chutes ride and the electric tower. He insisted that the phantasmagoric pachyderm hung by her trunk and wiggled her toes.

  “Not to be believed,” a newspaper opined.

  The following day, Pucciani led a group of six laborers to see Hugh Thomas, the electrician who had thrown the switch on Topsy and who also served as a work foreman at Luna. The laborers announced they were quitting and demanded their pay. Thomas dismissed the talk of a ghost as “hocus pocus” but gave them their wages. He hired a new crew that may have known little or nothing of Topsy’s sad end.

  Then, at the advent of the 1905 season, Barlow brought six of his herd to Luna Park from the Hippodrome, the cavernous theater that Thompson and Dundy had opened near Times Square. The elephants had been showing no signs of stress as they performed on stage before capacity crowds of five thousand in such mega-productions as Yankee Circus on Mars, in which they at least appeared to drive automobiles stocked with chorus girls. They seemed equally unbothered by the blazing lights and the throngs of fu
n seekers at Luna Park. Barlow described his generally docile and obedient charges as “the best elephants on earth.”

  And that made Barlow all the more puzzled on seeing his elephants become so uncharacteristically restive whenever they were near a quiet and remote back corner at the western end of the twenty-two-acre lot, behind the stables where they were lodged in the off-hours. Any time the elephants were brought near this particular spot where fantasyland became bare dirt, they would halt and visibly shiver as they raised their trunks and trumpeted. Whatever the cause of the agitation, it had almost certainly spurred the triple escape and Fanny’s swim.

  As Barlow now brought Fanny back to Luna Park, Fanny had become almost as big an aquatic star as the site’s previous owner, the Fearless Frogman, but the mystery of what prompted her to bolt remained unsolved. The agitation continued into early August and Barlow finally remarked on the persistent trouble to Thompson. The “Amuser of Millions” went silent, and then suddenly erupted in laughter.

  Thompson told Barlow to take him to the patch that had this seemingly inexplicable effect on the elephants. The new work crew was summoned with shovels. These laborers were the replacements of those who had quit en masse over what was ridiculed as superstitious nonsense involving a gargantuan ghost.

  “Dig,” Thompson now commanded.

  Fanny, along with Alice and Jennie, stood nearby, watching intently as the men began digging on this hot summer day in 1905. The work stopped and the trio raised their trunks and trumpeted mournfully as Barlow peered down. He did not need his long experience with elephants to recognize immediately that what lay in the hole was the answer to the mystery.

  The three elephants at the edge of the unmarked grave trumpeted mournfully as Topsy’s head was removed. Barlow had the three-hundred-pound skull carted away, to be delivered to his home in Huntington, Long Island. The crew filled in the hole and the elephants returned silently to their stalls. They offered no more trouble and continued to thrill the crowds.