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

by Michael Daly

  Barnum issued a challenge of his own:

  With regard to the proposed donation to the Soldiers’ Aid Association, Mr. Barnum has already paid thousands of dollars to aid the war for the Union, and he agrees that the services of Commodore Nutt, General Tom Thumb, or any other attraction which he has control of, are at the FREE disposal of the Soldiers’ Aid Association whenever they hold a fair or exhibition where they may be of use to them. And Mr. B. will also present one thousand dollars to this Association whenever the showman alluded to will give five hundred dollars, after having paid up his unfortunate employees.

  The exchange was dubbed the Battle of the Dwarfs and provided welcome merriment in a week when Union forces crossed the Potomac from Washington into Virginia. Lincoln would remain dissatisfied with the real generals until Ulysses S. Grant caught his attention. Grant was the son of a circus fan who would walk entire days to see one. Young Grant had gone to several as a boy and at the age of eleven answered a ringside challenge for boys to try for a five-dollar prize by riding a trick pony that had been trained to throw its rider. Grant managed to hang on and become the first ever to walk off with the prize, demonstrating a tenacity that would distinguish him during what was becoming a horror beyond imagining.

  Back in New York, Barnum offered further diversion from the War Between the States with the wedding of his general, Tom Thumb, and the diminutive Lavinnia Warren at Grace Church on Broadway. The event was followed by a “honeymoon” reception hosted by President Lincoln at the White House.

  The wedding photographer was Mathew Brady, who had a studio across Broadway from Barnum’s Museum. Brady also photographed Barnum himself, as well as such other museum stars as the Bearded Lady, the Living Skeleton, the Siamese Twins, the Leopard Child, and the Pinhead, though none of the animals. He printed the photos of the celebrity performers on cartes de visite, cards that were collected and traded, precursors of baseball cards.

  Brady became a celebrity himself with the photographs he and his assistants took of the Civil War, whose many battles included one in Lynchburg, where the locals had rioted over the admission price at Barnum’s circus a decade before. The stark battlefield photographs gave many civilians their first sense of the enormity of the carnage that eventually claimed more than 600,000 lives. The expression “see the elephant” now came to mean witnessing combat, the bloodiest extreme of human experience.

  SEVEN

  4-Paw

  Five days after the war’s end and by chance the very day Lincoln was assassinated, the elephant Romeo passed into the possession of a new owner.

  The entire Mabie menagerie was purchased by Adam Forbach, who had started out as a butcher boy in Philadelphia. He had been earning four dollars a month, board included, which was very generous for that time, but he hungered for greater glory and ran away from home, heading west. He eventually came to Cincinnati, where he reverted to supporting himself the only way he knew how, working for a butcher with the handy name of John Butcher. Forbach’s restless desire for more prompted him to walk to Dayton and he there secured employment with another butcher, who had a sideline trading horses that were marginally more valuable alive than dead. Forbach had at least broadened his knowledge when he relinquished any instant hope of a more glamorous existence and returned home to Philadelphia.

  He had enough innate business sense and little enough business principles that he saw an immediate opportunity when the Civil War caused a shortage of horses. He began buying superannuated nags from Philadelphia’s horse-drawn tram companies and briefly stashing them on an island in the Schuylkill River. He then sold the same sorry creatures back to the same companies as fresh horses.

  As the war dragged on, Forbach branched out, buying and selling as many as 10,000 horses in a year as he supplied the military as well as private companies. He established a “veterinary hospital” to work his usual scam on a grander scale, resulting in Union cavalrymen riding into battle on newly purchased mounts that had previously been declared unfit.

  Forbach also sold forty-four horses for $9,000 to John “Pogey” O’Brien, whose circus was known for traveling with a band of particularly brazen and energetic pickpockets and swindlers. O’Brien liked to sport a double-breasted velvet vest with two rows of diamond-encrusted buttons and a gold watch chain from which hung a golden elephant charm with rubies for eyes and a diamond set in the trunk, but he failed to keep up the payments on the horses. He may have been distracted from business when his famously attractive daughter eloped with a sideshow attraction who had no arms or legs.

  Forbach caught up with the delinquent O’Brien’s circus in Pittsburgh, hoping to collect. The two became partners instead, the thirty-four-year-old Forbach proving to be an early example of a businessman smitten by show business.

  From the start, Forbach was determined to make the show more than just another traveling circus and himself more than just another showman. He ventured a variation on his scam of hyping broken-down horses as new mounts and announced that he had retained Dan Rice for $1,000 a week, as if the clown were still the biggest star in America and not struggling in the continued disgrace of having played both sides in the Civil War. The actual salary was likely just a fraction of that but Rice was happy to go along with the fiction, making his own effort to resurrect his image by building a war memorial in his hometown of Girard, Pennsylvania.

  On his part, Forbach changed his name to Forepaugh, which he sometimes styled as 4-Paw, and joined his new partner in acquiring the ten animals of the Mabie menagerie. These included not just Romeo, but the elephant Annie, aka the new Juliet. Craven continued on as trainer. Romeo remained manageable as the New Dan Rice Menagerie braved the travails of the road.

  The easiest part was the show itself. The hard work in a circus began as the evening performance was ending around 10:00 p.m. Crews would have already begun packing and as the audience departed they took down the tents and rolled up the canvas and packed the seat planks along with the poles and stakes and theatrical props and hundreds of other items, all by the light of pitch pine torches or outsize cotton balls soaked in alcohol. They then grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep, roused around 2:00 a.m. by the watchman. They wolfed down an early breakfast and set out in two wagon “trains.” The baggage train was faster and proceeded first at maybe eight miles an hour with the tents and equipment, led through the darkness on unmarked roads by a “boss hostler” on horseback who followed written directions such as “turn at red house” that would have been much more helpful in daylight. They would place some brush or a fence rail across the wrong turns at intersections to direct the slower cage train coming behind at maybe four miles per hour with the menagerie and the performers and the band. The worse the road, the worse the weather, the earlier they left. They had no waterproofs to ward off the rain and stripped off their shirts and stashed them in a box under the wagon so as to have dry clothes at the show. No matter how hard it rained, no matter how muddy the road became, a circus kept going.

  “Rain meant mud and mud meant trouble,” George Conklin would write of his time as a young circus driver. “Almost always some of them got in so deep that the rest of the train had to stop and pull them out.”

  Then on they would go, the drivers calling out “whoa up!” in the darkness if they had to stop. Drivers regularly dozed off, with predictable results.

  “Everything seemed to conspire together to make the desire to sleep irresistible; the previous lack of it, the time, the quiet and darkness of night, the sounds of the train itself—jangling of harness and chains, chuckle and rumble of wheels, and rhythmic tread of horses’ feet,” Conklin would recall.

  The tread of the elephants was preternaturally quiet given the animals’ size; they walked on tiptoe as always, sure-footed thanks to the support of their thick footpads and an improbable sense of balance. They seemed tireless, ambling at around four miles per hour, the average speed of
the cage train, much the same pace as if they were traveling in the forest, free of stakes and tethers, away from the roaring crowds and the brutal trainer. These were a Romeo and a Juliet brought together by force rather than love, a Juliet who should have been with a herd of females, a Romeo who should have been on his own since adolescence. Their every muted step away from the previous performance was a step toward more of the same at the next, but in between they were as close to free as they were likely ever to be again.

  The show’s perpetual goal on the road was for the elephants and the caged animals to arrive at the next destination in time to parade through the middle of town. The baggage train would have arrived far enough in advance to set up the tents. The exhausted workmen would sprawl around the perimeter of the big top during the shows, keeping a half-open eye out for kids trying to sneak in under the canvas while the elephants and other animals performed along with the acrobats and clowns.

  Elephants see best in dim light such as that in a deep forest, but humans require brightness and the show did its best with a source that had been in use for centuries, nearly as long as elephants have been taken captive. Candles were stuck with melted wax atop the wagon wheels in the menagerie tent. The big top was lit with five “chandeliers,” boards holding three hundred candles each, but the illumination was still chancy.

  “At best the light was dim, flickering, and uncertain, but it was seldom that it was at its best, for often there were draughts sucking and drawing through the tent, making the candles flare up and smoke, or perhaps blowing out all on one side of the ‘chandelier’ while they were smoking on the other,” Conklin remembered.

  The show packed up by torchlight and the candles were lit again at the next stop. O’Brien continued to cadge extra income by selling “privileges”—not just the rights to peddle candy and lemonade on circus grounds, but also the rights of pickpockets, swindlers, and gamblers to work the show and move with it from town to town. The crooks included “Monday men,” who specialized in stealing the wash off the clotheslines of the townspeople while they were at the parade or the show. O’Brien even employed a “fixer,” who traveled a day ahead, visiting the local authorities.

  “And by a generous use of blarney and money endeavored to secure immunity from police interference,” Conklin wrote. “If his efforts were successful, and in those days they nearly always were, the town was said to be ‘fixed’ or ‘safe.’”

  O’Brien further accommodated the pickpockets by arranging for an announcement as the crowd waited for the ticket wagon to open.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we warn you to look out for pickpockets. This show does its best to keep them away, but sometimes they do get on the grounds. We don’t want to have any of you lose your money while coming to our show, so we tell you about them and give you a chance to look out.”

  The invariable reflex was to check and make sure you still had your wallet, whose exact location the pickpockets duly noted.

  “They in turn got busy,” Conklin noted.

  What the pickpockets did not get, the three-card monte dealers and magic elixir peddlers sought. The customer who reached the ticket wagon then faced a master shortchange artist whose skill in his chosen field matched that of any of the performers inside.

  All told, enough of the ill-gotten gains ended up in Forepaugh’s left vest pocket that he was as enthusiastically crooked as O’Brien.

  The 1866 season ended in Philadelphia, where Romeo again suffered a “spell,” charging into the street and chasing after the citizenry and generally causing havoc. Craven hurried to the scene and called to him. Romeo pursued Craven back into the quarters as before, but this time the elephant’s rage was so all-consuming that he went after Juliet, knocking her down. Craven grabbed the shotgun as Romeo seemed poised to hit Juliet again and maybe kill her.

  “I fired, and instead of hitting his trunk, the shot went into one of his eyes,” Craven later said.

  The owners could not have been pleased that Romeo was left partly blind, but they no doubt would have been considerably more displeased by the publicity that would have attended the news that Romeo had killed Juliet.

  In the meantime, there had been a falling-out between Forepaugh and O’Brien. The owners dissolved their partnership and set up rival shows, with winter quarters across the street from each other in Philadelphia. O’Brien took the latest Juliet. Forepaugh took Romeo, and whatever separation pain the elephants suffered it did not seem to be of a Shakespearean magnitude.

  Forepaugh also kept Dan Rice, continuing to “pay” the clown $1,000 a week. Forepaugh replaced any animals whose natural life span had been prematurely punctuated by the rigors of circus life. And he bought enough new ones to create a second show of his own.

  “Forepaugh, despite of the many contributions he has made to the zoological cemetery in Philadelphia, intends to run two shows,” reported the New York Clipper.

  The new “Forepaugh’s Circus and Menagerie” headed west with Romeo and twenty cages of animals. The Rice show stayed east, with dwindling profits reflecting his continued decline in popularity. Rice’s latest and ultimate victim of fast-talking fakery was himself. He seemed to believe he really was a $1000-a-week star and when his old act was met with a yawn he decided he was meant for what he termed “higher things.” He became increasingly cutting in his monologues. And he was further hampered by the increased size of the new big top, which forced the spectators in the farther reaches to strain to hear what then made them regret the effort.

  Some wags on the show hung a “Dan Rice for President” banner as a goof, but he took it seriously and announced his candidacy. The leading candidate, the precocious circus contestant turned victorious general Ulysses Grant, was not concerned.

  The next season, Forepaugh decided to field just one show, under no name but his own. He positioned himself during the performances either by the ticket wagon or at the main entrance to the big top, keeping a keen eye on attendance. He declared he would plow back his profits into making the Forepaugh show ever grander and at least in this regard he was as good as his word, adding ever more bandwagons and performers and animals. He became the first showman to have a separate tent just for the menagerie, where the animals could be admired between appearances in the ring.

  In all other regards, Forepaugh was notoriously tightfisted, often “redcrossing” his employees, shortchanging their pay envelopes, then blaming a subordinate if they dared challenge him.

  “It was a common question among his men, ‘How much are you short this week?’” Conklin would recall.

  Forepaugh chose to save a few more dollars by replacing Craven with a fellow named John Trowolla, who had little experience with elephants but would double as a trainer and ringmaster for forty dollars a week. Trowolla’s view of Romeo was reflected in a newspaper account of a lawsuit he subsequently filed alleging that Forepaugh had unfairly fired him, replacing him with somebody who worked even cheaper.

  “Mr. Trowolla being sworn testified that Mr. Forepaugh employed him to take charge of an immense, strong and ferocious elephant named Romeo.”

  Forepaugh took the stand, insisting that Trowolla had asked to be relieved of his duties. Forepaugh did confirm that he had hired a new trainer at twenty-five dollars a week. The new trainer, William “Canada Bill” Williams, had been such a big believer in the primacy of force he was termed an “elephant killer.” And if he had not actually killed one, it was not for lack of effort. The outcome had been what Craven and indeed Old Bet’s keeper might have predicted.

  “Witness then engaged the elephant killer Williams and he took charge of Romeo and had no trouble with him from that time forth until the animal killed him,” the newspaper reported.

  Whether due to musth or mistreatment or both, Romeo remained so enraged for months after the latest killing that his minders had to feed and water him through a hole in the roof of the
splintered stall where he was chained. He took particular dislike to certain people and threw stones at them with his trunk when they were within range. Residents surrounding the Forepaugh show’s winter quarters outside Philadelphia expressed concern that he might escape and go on a rampage.

  “Mr. Forepaugh states that Romeo cost him $40,000 and of course he is anxious to have such a valuable piece of property brought to terms,” the Philadelphia Ledger reported.

  That was actually just $2,000 less than the cost of the entire Mabie menagerie, but Romeo did represent a considerable investment. He would also constitute a considerable loss if this star attraction stayed chained in a stall when the show resumed touring. The first show of the 1868 season was just days away when Forepaugh suffered an expense he had sought to avoid while under the impression that handling an elephant required no more expertise than handling a big horse.

  “In the spring, I was sent for to conquer him,” Craven later said.

  Romeo’s rage only increased when he beheld Craven with his one good eye. Craven proceeded to bring him down as before, lassoing the legs and drawing them out, this time with block and tackle and the pulling power of gawkers who were enlisted to assist.

  But Craven had not yet come to understand that he needed only to keep the elephant restrained until the “spell” passed.

  “We got him down and began to punish him. It took us all Saturday and Sunday night and until Monday morning before he halloed.”