by Michael Daly
And what made the creature all the more fascinating was the appendage the French had termed a trompe, or trumpet, becoming trunk in English. Absent this feature, the creature might have seemed like just some huge, big-eared cow. This proboscis unlike any other extended, reached, selected, retrieved with surprising dexterity and precision. The fingerlike digit at the end was clearly sensitive and all the more remarkable in contrast with the creature’s brutish bulk. The inescapable impression from witnessing the trunk’s workings was that it was guided by intelligence beyond that of all the other beasts, both common and exotic, with the possible exception of the more human-like simians.
The elephant was clearly a whole other concept of corporeal being and yet was our kin in sagacity, to a degree that was difficult to gauge. Here was an alien intelligence native to our own planet.
Here also was great commercial potential. Crowninshield got not only the glory, but also the gold, and double what he had anticipated. The Journal and Patriotic Register reported the sale of “an ELEPHANT” to an unnamed buyer in a back-pages brief, noting, “The animal is sold for $10,000, being supposed to be the greatest price ever given for an animal in Europe or America.” The owner, identified in a subsequent report only as a “Welshman named Owen” quickly recouped the exorbitant expenditure with pay-per-glimpse exhibitions of what was given no name beyond simply “The Elephant.”
After two months on exhibition in New York, The Elephant was walked untethered to Philadelphia, then America’s biggest city. The curious flocked to High Street, where a look could be had for fifty cents (twenty-five cents for children) between dawn and dusk. The Philadelphia Aurora reported on July 28, 1796, presuming the behemoth to be male, “There has just arrived from New York, in this city, on his way to Charleston, an elephant. He possesses the adroitness of the beaver, the intelligence of the ape and the fidelity of the dog. He is the largest of the quadrupeds; the earth trembles under his feet.”
The report added an observation that would prove generally true for elephants through the years to come: “He has the power of tearing up the largest trees and yet is tractable to those who use him well.”
The Elephant continued a long trek south, generally traveling at night to prevent any free glimpses, making periodic appearances on the way to wintering in Charleston. She was back in Philadelphia in the spring, when the city was visited by another new arrival in America by way of New York. Thomas Abthorpe Cooper was a promising young actor from England scheduled to make his Philadelphia debut at the Chestnut Street Theater. There was a problem as opening night for Alexander the Great approached.
“The seats were not taken,” a contemporary theater historian named William Dunlap noted.
Cooper had a financial guarantee from the theater’s manager no matter what the turnout, but his foremost concern was something other than money. “My fame, which is my deity,” he wrote in a letter.
He then had an epiphany that, in a contemporary’s words, “might save the manager and relieve him from the mortification of a beggarly house.” He made his inspiration a reality with a sixty-dollar rental fee and an extra bill announcing, “In Act I, the Grand Triumphal Entry of Alexander into Babylon; in which will be introduced for this night only a Real Elephant, caparisoned as for war.”
The show sold out, all two-thousand-plus seats taken.
“Those who had declined to take a seat to see and support the best tragedian that had yet played in America filled the house to overflowing to see the stage dishonored by an elephant,” the historian Dunlap sniffed.
Cooper went on to the fame he so desired, described by some as America’s first great actor. The bigger draw, The Elephant, proceeded north for a return engagement in New York, a stint behind a coffee shop in Providence, and then on to Boston.
“The most respectable Animal in the world,” a broadside in Boston announced. “In size he [sic] surpasses all other terrestrial creatures; and by his intelligence, he makes as near an approach to man, as matter can approach spirit.”
Experiments two centuries hence would indicate that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror as distinct from others of their kind, a capacity shared only by humans after the age of two, as well as adult apes, though not monkeys, and occasionally dolphins. The keeper of The Elephant may have detected in those huge eyes the glint of the rare species whose members have a sense of self. The keeper certainly noted The Elephant’s memory. The broadside reported that after being separated from her owner for ten weeks, The Elephant had recognized the man the moment he walked in the door and had cried out “till his [sic] Friend came within reach of his trunk, with which he caressed him, to the astonishment of all those who saw him.”
The broadside also reported that The Elephant “eats 130 weight a day, and drinks all kinds of spirituous liquors.”
“Some days he has drank 30 bottles of porter, drawing the corks with his trunk. He is so tame that he travels loose, and has never attempted to hurt any one.”
There was one warning.
“The Elephant having destroyed many papers of consequence, it is recommended to visitors not come near him with such papers.”
The original admission fee was fifty cents, but this was too much in Boston, even for “the greatest natural curiosity ever presented to the public.” The price was cut to a quarter.
The Elephant went on to Salem, the hometown of Hathorne and Crowinshield. Those who paid the twenty-five cents there included Rev. William Bentley of Salem, who was widely regarded as one of the better of his species. Bentley was happy to turn over his pulpit to clerics of other faiths and supported education for all, African-Americans included. He spoke twenty-one languages and gave over half his minister’s salary to needy parishioners. He was also extremely observant, as evidenced in his diary.
“Went to the Market House to see the Elephant,” he wrote. “The crowd of spectators forbad me any but a general & superficial view of him. He was six feet, four inches high. Of large Volume, his skin black, as tho’ lately oiled. A short hair was on every part, but not sufficient for a covering. His tail hung one third of his height, but without any long hairs at the end of it.”
Bentley saw that the creature remained more independent than had been suggested: “His legs were still at command at the joints, but he could not be persuaded to lie down. The Keeper repeatedly mounted him but he persisted in shaking him off.”
The Elephant had apparently been looking for something else when he destroyed the papers mentioned in the warning.
“Bread & Hay were given him and he took bread out of the pockets of the Spectators,” Bentley observed.
Bentley also noted a feature that was widely either overlooked or ignored.
“We say his because the common language. It is a female & teats appeared just behind the forelegs.”
Yet, as progressive and good-hearted as he was with his fellow humans, Bentley did not seem even to consider the trauma this young elephant must have suffered during capture and then transport across the sea and now, surrounded as she was by boisterous crowds. The Elephant may have been as close to man as matter can be to spirit, but she was still viewed as matter. Neither Bentley nor seemingly anyone else felt she warranted more concern and sympathy than cattle or sheep as she continued her perpetual tour of the curious.
The reception in the tiny South Carolina hamlet of Asheepo was noted by a British traveler named John Davis. He later wrote, “The inhabitants of every sex and age had gathered round. . . . I could not but admire the docility of the elephant, who in solemn majesty received the gifts of the children with his trunk.”
Davis went into one of the hamlet’s handful of log houses, where an elderly slave was squatted in front of a fire, evincing no interest in the creature.
“Well, old man, why don’t you go out to look at the elephant?” Davis asked.
“He calf!”
the slave replied.
The Elephant had grown two feet since her arrival in America, but she was still an Asian. She seemed therefore but a calf compared to the even bigger African elephants the slave had seen in his own land before he was snatched and transported and sold in much the same way as this traveling curiosity, though almost certainly with even less care and concern. The ultimate fate of this first elephant is unclear, though she did not likely live the fifty to seventy years typical in the wild. A captive probably would not have survived much more than half that time as stress and lack of exercise and poor diet took their toll.
The elderly man in the log house might have felt a stab of homesickness had he seen the second elephant to arrive in America. This big African had been acquired for a reported mere twenty dollars at an auction in London, a price at least partly attributable to the fact that elephants were nothing new to England, the first having been brought there in 43 ad by the Roman emperor Claudius, the second having been given by Louis IX of France to Henry III in 1255. The English king made the gift part of the Tower of London menagerie, but the elephant died two years later, reportedly from drinking too much wine. The European mainland had seen numerous elephants, two of them having gained considerable renown. The first, the male Hanno, had been given by King Manuel of Portugal to Pope Leo X in 1514 but died two years later after being administered a laxative mixed with gold, in keeping with his status. He was buried on the Vatican grounds, and the pope personally wrote his epitaph, which included “in my brutish breast they perceived human feelings.” The second was the female Hansken, who toured the continent in the seventeenth century, performing such tricks as waving a flag and wielding a sword. Rembrandt made four chalk sketches of her in 1637.
The well-regarded American artist Edward Savage, known for his portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, acquired the further distinction of exhibiting what landed in 1804 in Boston as America’s second elephant.
At one point, this new elephant was displayed in Manhattan at the Bull’s Head Tavern, where Washington had assembled the troops for his triumphal entry into the city two decades before. The tavern was now owned by a former Hessian soldier turned butcher. Henry Astor was from the small German town of Waldorf and was an older brother of John Jacob Astor, who would become the richest man in America, its first multimillionaire.
Tens of thousands of cows, pigs, and lambs were herded each year from outlying farms to the pens surrounding this tavern on the Bowery, which was then the northern edge of the city. Prize cattle were sometimes paraded past the homes of the rich with a band leading the way and the elder Astor and other butchers coming behind, knives ready to fulfill orders. The best livestock were displayed in the pens adjoining the tavern while butchers and drovers bartered, drank, and gambled.
“A literal stock market,” one writer would later note.
Amid the mooing and squealing and bleating and the accompanying great stink of the doomed stood the largest of the animals, one nobody contemplated butchering. This creature was too obviously sentient for simple slaughter, not to mention too rare and valuable, as a drover from the Westchester town of Somers proved when he bought the elephant for a reported $1,000.
Along with being a drover, Hachaliah “Hack” Bailey was a farmer, cattle merchant, land speculator, stage line manager, toll collector, postmaster, town inspector, school official, and militia officer. One problem his new acquisition presented was what to call her, for this was not The Elephant, only An elephant. The creature would require a name to distinguish her from the one who was still out there, touring.
Bailey named the elephant Old Bet in honor of his three-year-old daughter, Betsy. The sentimental moniker aside, the elephant was still first and foremost an investment. Bailey hedged his risk much in the way of investors in the other kind of stock market that would later arise in downtown Manhattan. He sold two shares of Old Bet for a total of $1,400 more than what the elephant had cost him, a sweet deal made sweeter by the prospect of a cut of the profits as one of the new partners took the elephant on tour.
The partner proved to be a bookkeeping precursor of modern movie studios, claiming that there had been no profits after expenses. Bailey responded by pointing a rifle at Old Bet.
“Do what you please with your half of that elephant, but I’m fairly determined to shoot my half,” he reportedly said.
Bailey thus secured his due share of the profits and put them toward also acquiring a caged tiger named Nero. The tiger was exhibited along with Old Bet as part of a traveling menagerie that included a bear and some dogs that performed tricks. The menagerie began using canvas sidewalls to ward off prying, unpaying eyes.
As had her predecessor, Old Bet traveled in freebie-warding darkness. One group of scalawags is said to have scattered a trail of potato peels off the main road to a stack of firewood. A dark form appeared and the scalawags set the wood ablaze, figuring to save everybody a quarter with the bonfire’s light. They beheld a horse covered with a blanket that had been sent ahead by Old Bet’s owner.
Unlike her predecessor, Old Bet tolerated people on her back. Her acquiescence in this regard was put to a test when she crossed paths with a traveling troupe of trick riders and acrobats in June of 1812.
The first such troupe had been brought to America back in 1793 by John Bill Ricketts, a famed British rider who built a wooden amphitheater known as a circus in Philadelphia. Even with the inclusion of a rope walker and a clown, public interest soon waned and he moved on to New York and Boston and other cities, tearing down the old circus and building a new one at each new locale. He finally set out for the West Indies, where he was captured by pirates and subsequently drowned in a shipwreck in 1800.
After a lull of seven years, other circus troupes began to perform, including one starring Cayetano Mariotini, who was described by the New York Clipper as morphing from “an incredibly fat fish woman in a huge bonnet and uncouth garments” into “an elegant cavalier” by peeling off layer after layer of clothing as he circled the ring standing astride two horses. On encountering Old Bet, Mariotini and his comrades prepared to make history by fitting a wooden platform on the elephant’s back. Old Bet remained remarkably accommodating as the troupe formed a pyramid and executed various gymnastic stunts atop her in the first joint performance of a menagerie and a circus troupe.
After this performance, Cayetano and his troupe parted ways with Old Bet and continued on, reaching Ohio and doing good business with the help of a disapproving editorial in the Chillicothe Weekly Recorder. The newspaper opined, “The circus business is an unlawful calling, one that cannot be defended on scriptural ground. The performances are calculated to amuse the giddy and thoughtless and to excite the laughter of fools. There is no tendency to administer useful instruction, to regulate affections or restrain the inordinate passions of this audience.”
Old Bet’s separate way took her to Maine, where she was exhibited in a stable yard behind a Portland tavern. Twelve-year-old Neal Dow, future mayor and Civil War general, would recall, “It was a great wonder and the people thronged Portland from many miles around, on foot, on horseback and in every conceivable conveyance.”
A prankster presented the elephant with some tobacco wrapped in paper. The resulting hilarity drew the attention of the keeper, whose experience with elephants could have been no more extensive than the time this one had been in America. He had learned enough to make a prediction regarding this apparently docile giant.
“[The keeper] asked what it was about and, upon being told, advised the man to get away from the place immediately because, as he said, the animal would be sure to resent it if opportunity offered and if he happened to pass within its reach would certainly kill him,” Dow later wrote.
The man initially scoffed, recalled Dow, “but the keeper was so positive it would be dangerous for him to remain that he concluded to go.”
The appearance
passed without incident. Old Bet proceeded on to the small Maine town of Alfred, on July 24, 1816. She there encountered another tormentor, a farmer named Daniel Davis. He is said to have teased Old Bet either by giving her tobacco or by offering her something to eat or drink and then snatching it away, possibly an alcoholic beverage, for which this elephant had also developed a taste.
Old Bet is said to have reacted as the keeper would have predicted. Davis might have been seriously hurt or killed, but the keeper hustled him away before he suffered anything worse than a torn vest. The keeper no doubt indicated to Davis that he had brought it on himself and would not likely be so lucky if he ever came near Old Bet again.
Various accounts hold that Davis argued with Bailey or felt the show had fleeced the locals or was outraged that it was violating the Sabbath. The twentieth-century writer James Agee would suggest Davis and his fellow farmers had believed Old Bet to be “the reincarnation of Behemoth.”
Most probably, Davis had imbibed a little liquor himself, further fuel to the fury of a tormentor who has met his comeuppance. He proved to be considerably more unpredictable than a tormented elephant, for nobody expected him to fetch a rifle and lie in wait. Davis shot Old Bet dead as she was led out of town.
“Ah! noble, generous, high minded intelligent animal, justly classed among the wonderful works of God!” read a letter to a newspaper from an Alfred resident before the shooter had been publicly identified. “Thou hadst past from the banks of the Ganges, to the shores of the new world, to gratify the just and laudable curiosity of mankind; to display the wonders of creation, and lead man to adore the maker and former of all things. And here thou hast come to fall by the hand of a miserable unknown caitiff, who only lives to disgrace his species.”