Jumbo in the New World

On the evening of September 15, 1885, a Northern Trunk freight train crossed Arthur Street in downtown St. Thomas, Ontario, and struck and killed a large elephant. This was not the sort of elephant usually found in St. Thomas, not even on nights when the circus passed through.

This was the most celebrated animal on the face of the earth — the one creature, with the exception of Mickey Mouse, to have its name canonized in dictionaries of the English language. This particular elephant was Jumbo, backbone of P.T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” and star of the most remarkable freak show to pitch a tent on Canadian soil.

From the outset, the story of elephants in the New World is an unhappy one. The first elephant to reach these shores was the Crowninshield Elephant, arriving in New York in 1796 aboard the privateer America. The career of this two-year-old from Bengal is not known, although it seems she was killed in Rhode Island in 1822.

In 1808, an African elephant was purchased in the nick of time from a New York slaughterhouse by businessman Hachilah Bailey. Old Bet, known today as the mother of America’s carnival business, was put to work in a “circus” consisting of a dog, two pigs, and a horse. In July 1816 near Alfred, Maine, a religious fanatic — outraged that poor farmers were spending hard-earned cash to see an elephant — shot the animal dead.

In 1874, a 3,000-kilogram elephant, Norma Jean, was struck by lightning while parading through the town square of Oquawka, Illinois. Following the tradition of disposing of dead elephants where they fall, the animal was buried on the spot. In Indiana in 1901, Big Charley was shot dead after trampling its trainer to death. It too was buried on the spot; the remains later washed away in a flood.

In 1903, American inventor Thomas Edison arranged to have an elephant publicly electrocuted in Luna Park. Up to that point Edison, in his bitter campaign to discredit the electrical theories of George Westinghouse, had been content to publicly electrocute cats and dogs.

When Topsy, an enraged circus elephant, trampled to death its third trainer in three years, Edison offered to “execute” the animal in a way that would demonstrate once and for all his belief in the dangers of alternating current. The electrocution of this elephant was filmed and apparently the footage can still be viewed at the Coney Island Museum.

Prior to his arrival in North America, Jumbo, “The Children’s Pet," had lived eighteen years in London, England, where one and a quarter million children, including a youthful Winston Churchill, had ridden on his back.

When British reporters learned that Jumbo was to become the “chattel of a wandering showman,” and an American at that, they were outraged. The London Daily Telegraph was particularly indignant that Jumbo, instead of enjoying “friendly trots with British boys and girls," would now be forced “to amuse a Yankee mob.”

JUMBO
King of Elephants,
Died at ST. THOMAS, Sept. 15, 1885,
AGED 24 YEARS
The pillar of a people 's hope,
The centre of the world's desire.

All that remained was a flood of elephant grease, bottled and sold as a curative ointment for aches and pains.

Today Jumbo is no longer “the pillar of a people’s hope,” nor perhaps is St. Thomas “the centre of the world’s desire." Nonetheless, the Jumbo industry is still alive. Books have been written (at least two), websites maintained, and a fingernail-sized crystal Jumbo (currently out of stock) is available for $33 (U.S.).

In 1985, St. Thomas council commissioned a massive elephant sculpture to grace the downtown core. Sculpted in New Brunswick, the concrete Jumbo was transported 1,720 kilometres across the country. In an incident that seems to mirror the sorry history of elephants in North America, the legs were cut off so that it could clear the bridges dotting the Trans-Canada Highway. No tourist brochure mentions St. Thomas without immediately bringing up Jumbo— “the best known non-human that ever lived," as one local booster proudly puts it.

If justice is to be found in the grim history of elephants in the New World, it’s not the justice of the legal system, but rather that of a curse that hovers over the Jumbo story.

The man who captured Jumbo, a German carpenter, Johan Schmidt, died delirious in the Abyssinian highlands. Carl Akeley, sent by Barnum to retrieve Jumbo’s skin, was himself seriously trampled by an elephant and met his death in the Belgian Congo while tracking a bush antelope.

His taxidermist colleague, Professor Henry Ward, was struck dead by a car in Chicago in 1906, becoming one of the world’s first recorded car-accident victims.

Matthew Scott, Jumbo’s personal handler, perished in a poorhouse in Bridgeport Connecticut, in 1914.

William Burnip, the engineer who drove the train on that fateful day, and later fashioned a tin elephant that he placed over the headlight of his deadly locomotive, was killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Finally, after four years of touring, Jumbo’s hide, which weighed 725 kilograms, was placed in Barnum’s Museum at Tufts College, Massachusetts. In 1975 the museum and all it contents were destroyed by fire.