Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  August 1, Martin Thorn (of William Guldensuppe)

  1899

  March 20, Martha M. Place (of stepdaughter). Sing Sing’s warden telegrammed Governor Theodore Roosevelt to assure him the world’s first Westinghoused female met her fate with fortitude.

  1900

  Four men fell to their deaths while constructing the elaborate geography of the Pan-American Exposition, with its canal, its gargantuan curved pergolas, its “Triumphal Bridge” that two carriage teams could ride across.

  Among the buildings were a paean to the US government modeled after a Spanish cathedral, a fireproof art-house, and a rainbow-colored Midway of pillars, columns, and domes that would house exhibitors from around the world. The Expo’s Temple of Music seated 2,200, and was installed with one of the largest organs ever built. A menagerie of animals from six continents—both trained and wild beasts—would be housed in a gigantic arena.

  And in the center of the plan, supported by an elephantine fountain, a four-hundred-foot Electrical Tower covered in eleven thousand Edison bulbs.

  The nineteenth century grew deadlier with each passing year. In March, the New York Herald reported at least a dozen elephant trainers had been killed by their animals since the previous spring. No paper of record appears to have kept tally of the deaths of elephants at the turn of the century:

  Tom the elephant, killed in Central Park (poisoned bran)

  Dick the Dancing Elephant, in Madison Square, after refusing to budge (strangled)

  Nero the elephant, hunted down in Racine (pitchforks)

  Sport the elephant, accidentally hit by a train and in need of euthanasia (the hanging, from a derrick, overseen by a newcomer to the American circus: Englishman Frank “The Animal King” Bostock)

  1901

  In the months leading up to the Pan-American Expo, 1,045 train cars arrived in Buffalo bearing supplies to appoint the fair. According to a March 17 Associated Press story:

  Two hundred animals consigned to a menagerie and destined ultimately to reach the Pan-American Exposition have reached Baltimore. They came on two steamers and are valued altogether at $100,000. They include two Indian elephants, two African zebras, five Abyssinian hyenas, two East India jaguars, five East Indian leopards, three royal Bengal tigers, six Polar bears, two Himalaya mountain sloth bears, two Indian cassowaries, two African emus, Indian yak, six African ostriches, three male African lions, three African lionesses, two Nubian lions and lionesses, one African giraffe, three South American panthers, one case of East Indian snakes, pythons, anacondas, boa constrictors, etc.; 100 birds and monkeys of various kinds and sizes from Africa, India, Gibraltar and Ceylon.

  April 21, in the Buffalo Evening News:

  “Big Lil,” an immense elephant, five sacred donkeys, and 12 sacred cattle, all part of Bostock’s wild animal show, arrived in Buffalo this morning.

  The management of this show is looking about for 100 mules whose owners have no scruples as to what becomes of their animals.

  April 25, in Peru, Indiana: Big Charley the elephant drowned a trainer—the fourth man he’d killed. He led a mob on a chase through the streets of Peru and out to a field. There, the mob threw him cyanide apples until he fell over. The town treasured his remains for a dozen years, until a flood washed away all but his tusks.

  On May 1, Thomas Edison sent a film crew to Buffalo to record the Pan-American Expo’s opening ceremonies and any other sights that might catch a quarter at his Kinetoscope parlors across the nation. Edison Studios’ Pan-American Exposition by Night is a breathtaking one-minute panorama—first of the sunlight dimming around the domed Temple of Music, and then heading east to the Electric Tower as the sky goes dark. A searchlight sends a massive beam from the “lantern” at the top of the four-hundred-foot tower, and each building appears in a bulb-lit outline. In the stark black-and-white contrasts of early film stock, the Expo skyline seems an X-ray of itself.

  For the Pan-American Exhibition’s Dedication Day on May 20, Vice President Roosevelt read aloud a telegram from President McKinley, who was scheduled to attend the festivities but delayed by his wife’s illness. I earnestly hope that this great exhibition may prove a blessing to every country of this hemisphere, said the president through the wire. His visit to Buffalo, the papers noted, would have to wait until September.

  Frank “The Animal King” Bostock arranged for his star elephant Big Lil to carry a caged lion on her back for the Midway Day Parade on July 24. Big Lil’ was yet another cow rumored to have been a paramour of the infamous Jumbo, now fifteen years gone. Bostock’s new elephant, Jumbo II, was not in Buffalo yet, but his shtick was already in place: an Abyssinian War hero, medaled by the recently deceased Queen Victoria. On his way to Buffalo, Jumbo II was reportedly sedated with coconut liqueur and, while intoxicated, he killed a horse on the train ramp.

  July 26, in the Buffalo Evening News:

  Twenty-nine heavy truck horses drew the wagon on which Jumbo II was carried. Curious crowds lined the streets from the depot at Carroll and Chicago Streets to the grounds. The elephant was penned up in an immense plank box and only his ears protruded. Nevertheless from the size of the box and from the evident way in which it cramped the beast it was easy for even the casual observer to note that he is a worthy successor to the name Jumbo.

  August 10, in the News again:

  The President of the United States will be in Buffalo to visit the Pan-American Exposition on the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th days of September. Such was the arrangement made with him in Canton yesterday by a committee representing the city and the Exposition.

  During this hottest month of the year, the Pan-American saw as many as forty thousand visitors per day. And amid the bustling crowds, a rumor—most likely started by Frank Bostock—that Big Lil the elephant and Jumbo II were falling in love.

  August 29, in the American Journal of Education:

  The most colossal and ponderous pachyderm ever in captivity is now on exhibition at the Bostock’s animal arena at the Pan American Exposition, and is known as Jumbo II.

  At the outbreak of the Abyssinian War Jumbo II, who was then called Rostum Single, was deported along with nineteen others. Although wounded severely, he stuck to his position whilst shot and shell flew in all directions, trumpeting shrilly and keeping the herd together, which otherwise would have stampeded.

  September 4, in the Atlantic Monthly:

  The Electric Tower is a great center of brilliancy. There are perhaps not a half million electric bulbs, but there are hundreds and thousands of them and you are willing to believe that there may be millions. Out of the city of beauty rises a massive pillar, like an overlooking flower in a gorgeous garden, a centerpiece in a cluster of gems, a venerable fabric of jeweled lace. There it stands, glowing with the lights of many thousand bulbs flashing its image in the basin at its feet, showing its gleaming dome to the people in neighboring cities.

  The September 6 itinerary of President McKinley’s visit to the Expo:

  8:15 a.m.—Leave the Milburn home.

  11:15 a.m.—Arrive at Niagara Falls.

  12:05 p.m.—Luncheon at the International Hotel.

  2:00 p.m.—Tour of Niagara Power House.

  4:00 p.m.—Arrive at the Temple of Music for public reception.

  4:07 p.m.—He said he waited in line, that he had placed the revolver in his right hand and had covered it with a handkerchief, and that he put the hand and revolver in his right-hand pocket and kept it there until he came to the place in the Temple of Music where the crowds were sifted into single file. Then he took the revolver, concealed under the handkerchief, from his pocket and held his hand across his stomach and, when he was opposite the President, he fired the shots.

  In the Temple of Music, the Coward Leon Czolgosz was immediately thrown to the ground, disarmed, and choked by the six-foot-six waiter who stood behind him in the presidential receiving line. Another bystander restrained him, and as a Secret Service agent pulled him from the temple, he punched Czolgos
z hard in the face until he bled. After trial, Czolgosz arrived at the Auburn Prison having been ransacked by the mobs of angry New Yorkers that awaited him on the train platforms. His clothes were in tatters and he could barely walk by the time he landed in his cell.

  The lamps in the Expo’s emergency hospital were so poor, surgery aides had to hold a mirror over the president to catch the light of the sun. An X-ray machine the Edison laboratories spent four years developing was on display at the fair, so an engineer rushed it from the Midway to the house where McKinley rested. They found a fairgoer of the president’s size to sit under a half-hour of electric fluorescence, and the X-ray successfully detected a nickel under the man’s back. It might have found the bullet lost in McKinley’s abdomen, had the wary medical team trusted the newfangled electric machine.

  The Edison Studios film, dated September 15, is called President McKinley’s Funeral Cortege at Buffalo, NY. It’s seven minutes long and begins with a military band marching at half-time, instruments lowered. A long color guard follows, and then rows upon rows of soldiers. Then Boy Scouts. Then three carriages pulled by two horses each. Finally, the casket, in a carriage with glass doors, pulled by four dark horses. When the flower-strewn casket is lifted out, the men remove their hats, despite the fact that it’s pouring.

  September 30, in the photo-series Shots on the Midway:

  There is a boxing kangaroo of almost human intelligence and sometimes more than human precision. And latterly the largest elephant in captivity, Jumbo II, late of his Majesty’s service in India, man-eater and howdah carrier, a walking mountain that weighs nine tons.

  October 29, in the Buffalo Evening News:

  At 7:12:30 o’clock this morning Leon Czolgosz, murderer of President McKinley, paid the extreme penalty exacted by the law for his crime. He was shocked to death by 1,700 volts of electricity. He went to the chair in exactly the same manner as have the majority of all the other murderers in this State, showing no particular sign of fear but, in fact, doing what few of them have done, talking to the witnesses while he was being strapped in the chair.

  “I killed the President because he was an enemy of the good people—of the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”

  In the last week of the fair, Jumbo II was said to have gone ugly from the close quarters backstage at Bostock’s Arena. The Buffalo Daily Courier reported he tried to kill two of his keepers with his trunk, breaking Charles Miller’s arm and sending Henry Mullen to the hospital with multiple injuries. Bostock said the men would have died, had Jumbo II’s legs not been so tightly chained.

  The last straw was either when Jumbo II (reportedly) took a swing at the eleven-year-old daughter of a Midway vendor or when he (reportedly) took a swing at Bostock himself.

  The Expo was not nearly as lucrative as “The Animal King” had anticipated, what with the rain, high winds, assassinations, etc. His star human act, four-foot-tall Chiquita the Doll Lady, had just run off with a ticket-taker and was suing him for twenty thousand dollars. Bostock made it known that he was in no mood to fool with an ugly elephant.

  November 2, in the Buffalo Evening News:

  The Pan-American Exposition is ended. At midnight Exposition President Milburn touched an electric button, connected by wires with the rheostat and causing the 160,000 incandescent lights in the grounds to darken forever. The ceremonies were simple but solemn in the extreme.

  The death of the Exposition was apparently painless.

  One unforeseen side effect of concluding the Expo—of dimming the magic it made—was an all-out riot. Late into “Buffalo Day,” the closing festivities of singing, dancing, and running to Bostock’s Arena to tease the camels and elephants escalated into breaking windows and tearing down statues. The mob smashed every light bulb they could onto the bricks of the Midway. Hooligans uprooted yards of landscaping to make switches, which they used to slap women in the face—extra points if the dollies bled. Rioters of both sexes choked one another with fistfuls of fallen confetti.

  On November 3, the Buffalo Evening News estimated ten thousand contributed to the chaos:

  None of the insane patients in the State Hospital escaped to the Pan-American Exposition on Saturday night, but judging by the wanton vandalism that ran riot there, it would be hard to explain it on any other score than that a hundred or more maniacs had been busy in the neighborhood.

  The place looked as if a herd of huge elephants had stampeded through it.

  On November 4, the debris from the riots still clogged the Midway when Frank Bostock announced the Expo’s true finale would be the death of an ugly elephant, at 2:30 p.m., most likely hanged or choked with chains. Tickets were set at a half-dollar, discounted for minors. The Expo’s train station scheduled extra arrivals. Buffalo’s officials begged Bostock to reconsider.

  That same day, in the Wilkes-Barre Times: UNEXPECTED PERFORMANCE ON THE BUFFALO MIDWAY.

  The Edison Studios’ Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison wasn’t finished until eleven days after the assassin’s death. The film is half real, half humbug. It shows live, execution-day footage of the prison exterior in the opening shot, the same jail that electrocuted the first man in history and Westinghoused dozens more until all state-sanctioned deaths were sent to New York’s other electric chair—Sing Sing’s “Old Sparky”—in 1914. Those trees in the opening shot are the very trees the men and boys climbed that same day to see if a view of the Czolgosz death was possible.

  But after this panoramic shot, the camera cuts to a brick-walled room, filmed not at Auburn, but with actors at Edison’s Manhattan studios, just three miles from the Pearl Street neighborhood Edison had electrified twenty years before.

  The fake guards quickly strap the fake assassin in the chair, all four of them buckling, attaching. The actor playing Czolgosz—Czolgosz II, if you will—is blindfolded, where the real Czolgosz wore a hood-cap in his final minutes. An official-looking man raises a finger and each time he does, an actor in the doorway mimes throwing a switch with his upstage hand. Czolgosz II inhales at the 1,700 volts of alternating current (not) moving through him, then braces himself into a higher sitting position. At the second sham jolt, he leans forward slightly, as if riding downhill.

  Jumbo II’s punishment began as water, moving a few miles upstream from the Falls. At the bottom of a canal that men had dug into the Niagara river, five-foot wheels turned in the liquid current. Their motion powered the twenty-one dynamos of the limestone powerhouse, and that energy morphed the liquid current into lightning. This moved through transformers that bolstered it into layered waves—2,200 alternating volts of them. In transmission cables the diameter of jelly jars, the lightning ran thirty miles inland to the dismantling fair, into the loud arena, where the Animal King turned to his elephant.

  November 11,

  in the Fort Worth Morning Register: DID NOT KILL HIM

  in the Kansas City Star: COULDN’T KILL THE ELEPHANT

  in the Kalamazoo Gazette: JUMBO II STILL LIVES

  in the San Francisco Call: TWO THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED ELECTRIC VOLTS FAIL TO KILL JUMBO AT EXPOSITION:

  Jumbo was chained to a plank platform. Electrodes the size of a large sponge were placed behind his ears and at the end of his spinal column. Only 2,200 volts had been provided for by those in charge. The shock was repeated six times. Jumbo wagged his tail, tore up a plank with his trunk, looked pleased and trumpeted a bit. The shocks had simply tickled him. Jumbo merely threw a trunkful of dirt over his back and refused to die.

  After the unsuccessful attempt to kill him, Jumbo was unhitched from his harness. When led back to his quarters the elephant was none the worse for his electric bath.

  Explanations made by the electricians for the failure were that Jumbo’s hide had the resistance of rubber and that this formed a non-conductor Impervious to electricity. Others declare that if it takes 1,800 volts to kill a man, it would necessarily take more than 2,200 volts to kill an elephant.

  On November 1
7, the Charlotte Observer reported that Bostock was now in talks to send the disgraced Jumbo II to a bullfighting promoter in Mexico. The last recorded use of a bullfight to execute an elephant was nearly two thousand years before, in the Roman Colosseum. Instead, Jumbo II remained in the states, soon shipped to a creditor in Manhattan Beach, Ohio. Bostock’s other elephant was sent to Coney Island, along with the Expo’s world-famous carnival “dark ride,” A Trip to the Moon.

  At the close of the first year of the new century, a tiger tore off Frank Bostock’s right arm while the man was saving a female performer from getting mauled. When asked about it, Bostock told the press the tiger was not to blame.

  1903

  Though his name is listed on the title card of every Kinetoscope movie, it’s unlikely Edison had much to do with the short films of Edison Studios. The War of Currents was basically over and alternating current had triumphed, so it’s possible he had no clue about the plans to make Electrocuting an Elephant. The film is a minute-long, live short of the first elephant—and the second female of any species on the planet—to be condemned to electrocution for her crimes.

  In the yards around Coney Island’s Luna Park, the condemned elephant places each foot onto a copper plate. Once ignited with over 6,000 volts of alternating current, they smoke beneath her planted feet. The smoke rises around her body, her trunk goes rigid, and all five tons of her list forward.

  In her youth, America had called her “The Baby Elephant”—another in a long line of animals with the same adorable, temporary name.

  June 25, in the New York Times: TWIN ELEPHANTS BORN:

  to Big Liz, the only female elephant in Bostock’s collection at Sea Beach Palace, Coney Island. One of the twins lived only a short time, but the other will probably survive.

  The twins were born between 4 and 4:30 p.m. in the stall which Big Liz regularly occupies. A wall of canvas was at once erected about them. The babies were directly named Shamrock III and Reliance. It was Reliance that died.