The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

by Margaret Creighton

  Then there was Madame La Belle Zelica and a new lion named Trilby. In the beginning of October in Rainbow City, Madame Zelica entered a cage with four lions and ordered them onto pedestals. Trilby complied—but became “sulky.” When the trainer’s back was turned, Trilby leaped onto her, dragged her to the floor, and slashed her face and shoulder. Come Buffalo Day, though, Madame Zelica, her arm in a sling and her face bandaged, and the lion, not necessarily contrite, were featured in a new act. The trainer’s brave reappearance, it was announced, “would be the most sensational performance of the year.”

  Jumbo II, however, was a different case. Maybe it was true that elephants who went into musth were too hard to handle. Or maybe this big elephant was close to the end of his run at Rainbow City and was expensive to box up, haul to the train station, and ship to a different state.

  Captain Maitland ensured that Jumbo II’s demise, or the means of it, was the talk of the town. Newsmen speculated about how the big animal would be killed. Some bad elephants, they knew, had been poisoned. Tip, an elephant at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, had been fed cyanide. Sport, on the other hand, one of Bostock’s elephants who had been injured, had been hanged by a steam derrick in Baltimore. Hanging, though, had its problems. The editors at the Courier recalled one sad scene when zoo elephants were forced to pull the rope that asphyxiated their companion. Then there was shooting. Maitland himself suggested this possibility, but he despaired of finding an elephant gun.

  Finally, there was electrocution. Niagara’s power was so close and plentiful.

  How much Bostock took inspiration from the public’s fascination with Leon Czolgosz’s end at the Auburn prison is unclear, but he couldn’t have missed seeing how the event took hold of people. And he was certainly aware of how, to some, this massive shock would be a fitting end to the fair. An Indian beast brought down by a British animal trainer with the help of the most modern Western technology? To many people, it would seem a perfect conclusion.

  Bostock set the date for November 9 at 2:30 p.m., and, soon enough, Captain Maitland broadcast the occasion. The show would take place in the Pan-American stadium, and special trains would run to the site.

  Notices also explained that admission would be charged. Bostock was asking fifty cents per person. Visitors needn’t worry about squandering their hard-earned cash, though. It would “be the sight of a lifetime.”4

  A reporter, referring to the public’s love of seeing others suffer, remarked that Bostock had conceived of a “spectacle fit for a Roman holiday.” Another man, a press agent, didn’t want his comments put into print. When asked whether Jumbo was really to be killed, he said he didn’t know. Then he added, “I think it’s a shame to kill him . . . but I don’t want you to publish it.” Of course he didn’t want them to publish it. The speaker was Jack Maitland himself, the Animal King’s greatest asset.

  Captain Maitland knew that there would be plenty of people eager to see an elephant brought to its knees. Thousands had paid to see the killing of local canines at the Indian dog feast, and this would be an even bigger marvel. There was something exotic about it, too. Killing an elephant in a stadium wasn’t exactly tracking an elephant in the bush, but it was as close as many would come to this elite and fashionable sport. Accounts of big-game hunting in the American West, South Asia, and Africa had a wide audience at the turn of the century, and details of stalking buffalo, bears, lions, tigers, and elephants reinforced prevailing ideas about civilization and empire.

  At the same time, many Americans came to know elephants not as quarry but as amiable and clownish animals. A ship’s officer named Nathaniel Hathorne, the father of the famous writer, was reportedly the first to bring a living elephant to the United States, in 1795. Sailing from Calcutta, he lettered the word “ELEPHANT” in the logbook, capitalizing his excitement. The crew took the two-year-old female ashore in New York and she proved to be “a great curiosity,” touring up and down the eastern seaboard, hoisted in and out of schooners.

  Word has it that a New York entrepreneur, Hachaliah Bailey, encouraged by this exhibit, bought a second elephant, “Old Bet,” and put her in a menagerie. Old Bet, it seems, didn’t live long, but accounts of her demise—she was apparently shot—vary. What is certain is that Hachaliah Bailey put up a monument to her that still stands, in Somers, New York, in front of his Elephant Hotel. And what is also clear is that Bailey’s animal show inspired a young Phineas T. Barnum to start a menagerie of his own later on.

  Elephants were such crowd-pleasers that, before long, traveling shows and circuses could not be without one. Affection for elephants echoed—among the middle class, at least—a rising sympathy for animals in general, as well as a sense that elephants shared with people a capacity for intelligence and empathy. Old Bet herself was pronounced to be nearly human. When her owner returned after a ten-week absence, the animal cried out and caressed him with her trunk. Bet was so obedient that she traveled without ropes and chains and drank “all kinds of spirituous liquors; some days . . . 30 bottles of porter, drawing the corks with [her] trunk.”

  The American public’s infatuation with elephants reached a crescendo in the late 1880s, when people met and fell in love with Jumbo. This pachyderm, who gave the English language a synonym for “enormous,” was captured in East Africa in 1861 and later raised and trained at Regent’s Park Zoo in London. Jumbo was known for his (usually) sweet temper, his love of peanuts and buns, and his willingness to carry children on his back. Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren rode Jumbo. Young Teddy Roosevelt rode Jumbo.

  In 1882, though, much to the consternation of English children, the seven-ton, eleven-and-a-half-foot-tall elephant was sold to P. T. Barnum and shipped to the United States. Barnum, who provided Jumbo with American gingerbread instead of British buns, had bought himself a moneymaker. People loved Jumbo, and they were grief-stricken when, in 1885, in Ontario, Jumbo was killed. Reports of the way that a locomotive accidentally slammed into the twenty-four-year-old elephant heightened their misery. Rumor had it that as the freight train bore down upon him, Jumbo moved a smaller elephant out of the way. Just as wrenching was the story of the dying Jumbo wrapping his trunk around his trainer.

  Bostock tapped into the fondness for elephants at his Pan-American animal show. He ordered Big Liz and a set of younger elephants to carry visitors around the Midway almost every day, and to perform tricks and engage in races. He showed off baby elephants who played seesaw, rolled barrels, and walked on their hind legs. And, for a long time, the showman sought public affection for Jumbo II, the “handsome” warrior. But not anymore.5

  II

  MRS. LORD’S ARMY

  On November 3, a reporter for an Erie, Pennsylvania, morning paper, eager to learn what had transpired in Bostock’s other newsworthy battle, rapped on the door of Tony Woeckener’s house on East Sixth Street. Ernest Woeckener, Tony’s father, a laborer at a local iron works, welcomed the newsman inside, where they navigated through a maze of instruments—a bass viol, a cello, a guitar, a banjo, two cornets, a tuba, and three violins. The older Woeckener, leader of the family band of seven musicians, ranging in age from five to eighteen, regaled the visitor with a short concert. With instrumental backup, a ten-year-old Woeckener girl warbled “Where the Apple Blossoms Bloom.” A five-year-old followed with “Come and Keep House with Me.” The Woeckeners could offer no news about Chiquita and Tony, however, and the reporter left empty-handed.

  In Buffalo, on November 8, another reporter had better luck. He found Tony in a hotel downtown. Without prompting, Tony spoke of his desperation and pulled out a letter from Chiquita. Written in tiny script, it began with “My Dearest Sweetheart” and concluded with a cluster of crosses, row after row. “These are kisses,” Tony explained. “Let anyone who doesn’t think she loves me look at that. And I’ve got a whole lot more just like that one in my pocket.” As for giving up and letting his wife go? He wouldn’t. “If it costs my life,” he said, “I’ll get her.” He
had to admit, though, that Bostock was outspending him by far, and his family was telling him it was time to come home.6

  By early afternoon on November 9, under heavy, cold skies, more than a thousand visitors made their way onto the fairgrounds. The Exposition was mostly a façade now—a stage set of empty pavilions and a Midway littered and muddied. At least the Electric Tower stood intact, a monumental reminder of the grand season. By two o’clock, the numbers of spectators had grown, as streetcars disgorged more and more people eager to see the end of the big elephant.

  In the stadium, electricians hooked up power. The public was probably familiar with the language of electrocution by now, but the press, always ready to share sensational details, offered reminders. Step-up transformers would deliver alternating current of eighteen hundred to eleven thousand volts of pressure to the elephant. Jumbo II, bound with chains and tied to wooden posts, would wear a harness that allowed electrodes and moistened sponges to fit snugly into his ears and mouth and near his tail. This, officials explained, was where the animal’s hide was most thin. They also said that they did not expect the process to take more than fifteen minutes, and that the end would be determined, just as it had been at Auburn, when physicians ascertained that “life was extinct.”

  Even as the technicians worked, though, people outside the grounds grew more disturbed. What had started as a murmur of dismay began to swell into anger. City residents, by the dozens, picked up phones and called Mayor Diehl and Exposition directors. They sent the Humane Society 150 messages. It wasn’t so much the killing of Jumbo, these protesters said, but the public killing. The head of the local SPCA, DeWitt Clinton, agreed. The humane killing of the elephant was “none of our concern.” But making it a show? “It was an outrage on public decency.”7

  In taking on Buffalo’s SPCA, Frank Bostock faced an opponent as fierce and determined as any he might ever encounter. The second-oldest animal-welfare society in the country, it had put together a record of tough-minded intervention.

  It all began in the late 1860s, with a small powerhouse of a woman named Mary Lord. Appalled by seeing thin and beaten-up mules pulling barges along the Erie Canal, Lord wrote to Henry Bergh, founder of the country’s first ASPCA in New York City, to describe what she had witnessed. Bergh was incensed. “The barbarity exhibited in the treatment of these unoffending animals,” he wrote back, “is a deep stain upon our boasted civilization. Something should, something must be done.” Soon enough, Lord had an organization and helped charge the bargemen with cruelty. To make its case to a judge, Lord’s group brought a stand of mules directly to the courthouse and pointed at the “galls on their necks” and their “starved and emaciated bodies.” The judge delivered a quick verdict of guilty.

  A fireball of “boundless sympathy,” Mary Lord, accompanied by her collie, trotted through city streets in a small phaeton drawn by four Shetland ponies, sniffing out mistreatment. She and her colleagues stood at stockyards to make sure that cattle, no matter their intended end, were transported with care and treated with decency. They opened a pound and visited every school in the city to talk about the needs of “dumb animals.” The society had formidable backers. One, an elderly Buffalonian, explained that he had taken up the cause of animal welfare when he was a young boy. He had killed a mother bird, and his father pointed out to him that the babies would now all perish. He never forgot that, and from then on never killed a living creature. He was one of the city’s most famous residents: former US president Millard Fillmore.8

  Mary Lord died in 1885, but the SPCA, despite being poorly funded, continued its work and in 1901 took on the challenge of the Pan-American Exposition. Its agents saw some problems right away. Horses pulling carts and wagons to the building sites were overworked and overheated. To the amusement of the public, the society equipped the animals with straw hats fitted with moist sponges in the crown.

  Mary Lord, friend to animals, honored in stained glass.

  Throughout the Exposition season, society members fanned out over the grounds, inspecting animal exhibits. They targeted the Midway’s Streets of Mexico because of its bullfight, but they soon realized that the bulls were exceedingly tame and there wasn’t much of a fight. Their efforts, though, caught the attention of a local editor, who reminded his readers that at the Pan-American, whose purpose was to show human progress, there was no place for “torture, either of animals or human beings.”

  The Humane Society discovered more serious issues elsewhere on the fairgrounds. The bears in the Idaho exhibit were covered with flies, and the ponies in the Indian Congress were sore and thin. Society members demanded that the ponies get more food and better oats, and, weeks later, were gratified to find them fat and well. The reformers also cited the Beautiful Orient concession for beating donkeys and camels and for forcing camels to kneel on hard stones to take on riders. They ordered cushions.

  They did not stop there. They pointed out the cruelty that provoked elks into diving headfirst into small tubs of water. An SPCA agent visiting the Midway show discovered that the animals’ diving was hardly voluntary. A “sharp instrument” hidden in the trainer’s hand forced the elks to make the long leap into tubs. The show’s manager was warned against repeating the offense.

  The society also identified abuse directed at Bonner, the mathematical horse. After someone heard cries coming from the horse’s stall in August, the group discovered that Bonner’s trainer whipped him into performing sums and other calculations. The trainer apologized, saying he hadn’t realized the horse’s mouth was bleeding.

  For all their attentiveness, it wasn’t until September, when their agent spotted a bleeding lion, that society members focused on Frank Bostock. They had missed the experiment of Jumbo II and Tiny Mite. They had also missed seeing the showman send his crocodile Ptolemy over Niagara Falls.9

  Maybe the society would have paid more attention to the Animal King if he hadn’t been a charming Englishman. British and American anticruelty societies focused on rescuing animals but tended to target perpetrators in immigrant and working-class communities. Formed by the urban well-to-do, the societies were sometimes as devoted to human social reform as to saving animals. In Rainbow City, the Humane Society followed this pattern, expending considerable energy on infractions in the Indian Congress and the Mexican and Orient concessions. It criticized the dog feast not because it was cruel to canines but because it was an “unedifying” spectacle. As for the doings of the English Animal King? The witty Captain Maitland showered the press with flattering copy that spoke of Bostock’s sophisticated pedigree. For the most part, Bostock slipped by.

  Perhaps Buffalo’s animal-protection officers would have paid more attention to the Bostock zoo if they knew that even in “civilized” England, the menagerist had been taken to court for animal abuse. In 1890, three years before he sailed for the United States, Bostock was charged with cruelty to eight horses. In fact, out of the forty horses he used to haul his menagerie from town to town, two-thirds were said to be suffering from open wounds. One had a cut thirteen inches long. Bostock sent a letter to the Leyland police court, admitting his guilt, but defended himself by saying that an inspector in Blackpool had told him his horses were in “workable condition.” Unfortunately for Bostock, the Blackpool inspector showed up in court, too, and declared that Bostock was telling a barefaced lie. Other witnesses reported that Bostock was more willing to pay the cheaper fines than to give his horses better treatment. The judge gave the showman the maximum penalty and ordered him to pay the fees of a veterinary surgeon.

  Although on occasion Bostock was arrested for cruelty to his show animals—such as the time he was accused of baiting and fighting two lions—it was the horses that hauled his equipment and cages, and were slaughtered for food, that were most commonly injured. In the spring of 1891, Bostock ran afoul of the RSPCA for dragging an injured horse behind one of his wagons, and again he was convicted of cruelty. Seven months later, in 1892, the police sent him back to court for wor
king horses that had open wounds. After another few months, a veterinarian testified that one of the showman’s horses suffered from a separated biceps muscle. And so it went, Bostock leaving a trail of fines, a wake of hurt animals.

  Two years later, he was in America.10

  Inside his stall that November morning, Jumbo II ate hay. A few hours later, and over at the stadium, several thousand spectators took their seats on wooden benches. They could see killing equipment at the end of the field: a wooden platform, stakes, and big copper wires running to a rubber-handled switch on the stadium wall.

  Then, suddenly, the crowd was told the show was off.

  “Society people” had brought their influence to bear on Mayor Diehl and demanded that he abort the event. The city, they said, needed to be “spared a reflection upon its dignity.” The mayor, himself an animal advocate, called Bostock to stop his show.

  The spectators, some of whom had come from miles away, were angry. A few took advantage of the offered refund and left for home. Other people—maybe five hundred of them—refused to move. They didn’t believe the execution had been canceled. They noticed that none of the electricians had left the platform. Then a rumor circulated that Bostock still intended to kill the elephant—it just wouldn’t be a public event.

  As the light faded and the weather cooled, the people stayed put. Then, at around five o’clock, they heard the sound they hoped for—the clinking of metal. Looking toward the entrance, they could see the big elephant being steered into the stadium. Two young elephants, themselves Exposition celebrities, strolled on either side of him. They looked, said one observer, like “a battleship convoyed by two torpedo boats.” Jumbo II, encircled by heavy chains, placidly reached out to his small companions, and, pulling up grass with his trunk, offered it to the one named Roger.