by Jon Scieszka
“[But] if you do this,” Scott told the circus agents, “I will do my best to get Jumbo into the box.”
Agents agreed.
Deal struck, Scott once again led Jumbo from the stable. This time the elephant followed docilely along. He did not dig in his heels or trumpet with fear. Instead he plodded up the ramp into the crate, where he calmly munched a peck of apples while workmen secured iron bars to the end of the box. When the crate at last rolled through the zoo gate, the elephant harrumphed. Then he held out his trunk to those who’d gathered to watch him go. Observed a newspaper reporter, “There was something peculiarly human in this attitude.”
Early the next morning, Jumbo set sail for America. At his side, sitting cross-legged on the crate’s hay-strewn floor, was his best friend, Matthew Scott.
Eighteen days later, on April 9, 1882, Jumbo’s ship sailed into New York Harbor. Thousands waited at the dock to greet him. Cheering, they followed the still-crated elephant up Broadway toward Madison Square Garden, where the circus was currently performing.
Once there, blacksmiths set to work removing the heavy iron bands from the end of the box. Jumbo was now free. But the elephant, crated since leaving England, seemed unsure. Gingerly he lowered a foot onto the auditorium floor but quickly lifted it as if the ground was hot. Trumpeting, he backed farther into his crate.
“Be still, Jumbo,” soothed Scott. “Easy, boy.”
The elephant tried the other foot.
“Come on, Jummie.”
Cautiously, slowly, Jumbo moved out of the box. When all four feet were on the floor, he looked around at the trapeze equipment, the Roman catapult, the three rings. Then he trumpeted again, dropped to his knees, and rolled onto his back. Joyfully he waved his legs and trunk in the air for several minutes. At last, standing again, he followed Scott to the elephant quarters at the back of the building. The circus’s thirty-one other pachyderms—all smaller, Asian elephants who stood no taller than Jumbo’s chin—started at the sight of the big African. “Mr. Jumbo marched along their line, saluting each one he came to,” Barnum later claimed. “They seized each other’s trunks, embraced, and altogether showed great delight at making a new friend.”
Matthew Scott told a different tale. According to the keeper, Jumbo was completely indifferent to the other elephants as he was led to his own, separate living space. “He clearly understood that he was circus royalty,” said Scott.
That same afternoon people mobbed the circus ticket office. Within minutes, all the seats for the day’s performance were sold out. The audience wanted just one thing: “Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!”
Barnum had not planned on exhibiting the elephant for several more weeks. He’d wanted to give both Jumbo and Scott time to settle into circus life. But with crowds clamoring and paying for just a glimpse of “England’s pet,” the showman changed his mind. For the next two weeks, while the circus remained at Madison Square Garden, Jumbo made a brief appearance at every performance. The audience was thrilled, and Barnum was seen rubbing his hands together with glee. In the first ten days, the elephant brought in an additional three hundred thousand dollars in ticket sales. (He would bring in a total of $1.5 million in his first year.) “I love that creature,” gushed Barnum. He looked forward to introducing the rest of the country to his newest and greatest star.
The Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson Circus did not spend the entire season in New York City. There simply weren’t enough paying customers for that. So after four weeks, the circus packed up and headed out on a tour of the eastern United States and Canada. Traveling by train, it crisscrossed the country in its one hundred privately owned railroad cars. Everything the circus needed was crammed in—acres of canvas and poles, costumes, cages, bleachers, thousands of posters, programs and tickets, banners and flags, instruments for the circus band, two dozen golden chariots, thousands of pounds of animal feed, and miles of electric lights as well as a power plant to illuminate them. The show’s animals also rode on board—horses, zebras, camels, giraffes, ostriches, tigers, and seals, as well as the performers themselves. There were clowns, acrobats, singers, dancers, sideshow artists, daredevils, trick roller skaters, and even a tribe of cannibals claiming to be from New Zealand.
Only one performer traveled in his own personal railroad car. Red with gold edging, the Jumbo Palace Car, as it was called, was forty feet long, thirteen feet tall, and eight feet wide. It was, recalled Scott, “as big as the railroad companies permitted. Any bigger and it would not have fit through tunnels or passed under low bridges.” Inside there was a separate bed and bathroom for Scott. When asked why he didn’t bunk with his fellow animal keepers, Scott replied, “I need no one but Jummie.”
To make the most of its time, the circus traveled at night, arriving at its next stop early the following morning. Then everyone, including the performers, worked together to haul loads and set up camp. The heaviest work was left for the animals. Horses, camels, and elephants lugged poles and dragged canvas. Only Jumbo was excused from this duty. Too valuable to be put to work, he stood watching (and eating oranges) as the circus sprang up around him.
It didn’t take long for keeper and elephant to fall into a routine. Every day before the performance, Scott exercised, fed, and bathed Jumbo. He filed his toenails and rubbed lotion behind his often-dry ears. And he made sure to leave “abundant time,” as he delicately phrased it, for Jumbo to “complete his business.” African elephants produce up to four hundred pounds of feces a day. Just the thought of Jumbo having a bathroom accident during a performance caused circus owners to shudder. “An offering of such magnitude would clear the tent within seconds,” remarked Barnum. Occasionally Jumbo’s “business” did not occur by the time the show was about to start. Then Scott commanded the elephant to rear back on his hind legs a few times. This usually produced the desired results.
Performance over, Scott led Jumbo back to their train car. Before falling asleep to the rhythmic clickety-clacking of the train, the two always shared a quart of ale. It was, said Scott, “Jummie’s favorite beverage.” But one night the keeper forgot to give Jumbo his share. No sooner had Scott drifted off to sleep than he felt Jumbo’s strong trunk curl around his waist. Seconds later he was ripped from his blankets and hoisted high into the air. “Only a promise to allow him the entire quart the following day saved my sleep,” he said.
Bedding down with Jumbo could also be dangerous. One night, as the circus train chugged toward its next tour stop, there suddenly came an ear-splitting blast of whistles. Brakes squealed and cars lurched as the locomotive barely missed colliding with another train. In his palace car Jumbo bellowed with fear. Panicked, he leaned toward Scott, accidentally pinning the keeper against the wall. For one second the elephant’s full weight pressed against him. The keeper gasped for air, his bones “on the brink of shattering.” Jumbo seemed to recognize the danger. Stumbling backward, he pushed Scott away with his trunk. The keeper tried to laugh the incident off. “Jummie gave me such a squeeze that I don’t want any more like it,” he told the doctor who examined him. But the damage was done. Badly bruised, with two broken ribs and a sprained wrist, Scott spent the next six days in the infirmary. For the first time in sixteen years, Jumbo found himself without Scott at his side. Unable to perform, moping about the circus grounds, the great elephant “looked like a little girl left without its mama,” recalled one circus performer.
Scott had another close call later that season. He was standing with Jumbo waiting for the performance to start when he heard a noise “like a bursting thunderstorm,” he recalled. Peeking around the curtain, he was horrified to see dozens of elephants stampeding toward him, smashing everything in their path. “If death ever stared me in the face,” said Scott, “it did at that moment. On came the black mass of animals, and I thought there was no escape from being crushed beneath their heavy feet.”
That’s when Scott felt Jumbo’s trunk wrap around his waist. The elephant pulled him back behind the curtain and placed him b
etween his massive front legs. Once the keeper was safely protected, Jumbo “stood firmly,” recalled Scott, “and stretched out his trunk, as rigid as the limb of a large tree, and permitted not one elephant to get past it.”
With Jumbo acting as a barricade, the stampeding elephants came to a stop. Circus workers quickly rounded them up and returned them to their enclosures. And Jumbo gently pulled Scott out from behind his legs. “He repaid me for all [the care] I’d given him by saving my life,” the keeper later reflected.
For that season, as well as the next three, Jumbo was the circus’s greatest star. Every night the big top (the biggest in the world, capable of holding twenty thousand people) was packed to overflowing, and hundreds of would-be circus goers had to be turned away. “Oh, please let me just see Jumbo,” begged one disappointed girl. “I won’t look at anything else!” When Barnum mentioned to a reporter that Jumbo liked onions, wagonloads arrived from all over the country. Fans sent loads of other gifts too: boxes of chocolates and baskets of fruit, hand-stitched quilts and crocheted pillows, jars of pickles and homemade preserves, expensive Cuban cigars, even a sewing machine. One Michigan mother named her ten-and-a-half-pound newborn baby Jumbo. The famous writer Mark Twain included Jumbo in one of his short stories. And every day mail sacks bulging with postcards and letters arrived at the circus post office. They were addressed simply to “Mr. Jumbo.”
On April 30, 1885, Jumbo left New York City for what was to be the last time. As he plodded through the streets toward the train station, a crowd of thousands gathered. They whooped and waved their hats in the air. A few tossed flowers. Others threw loaves of bread. “Until next year, Jumbo!” called some. “See you next season,” hollered others.
The 1885 tour season was a long one—eighty different towns in four months. The circus stopped in Philadelphia and Washington, before heading west toward Cincinnati and St. Louis. As summer faded, it moved north toward Chicago and Detroit and across the Canadian border. Both Scott and Jumbo felt exhausted when the circus finally pulled into one of its last stops—the quiet town of St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada.
Jumbo waited behind the curtain for his cue. So far the St. Thomas performance had gone off without a hitch. The trapeze artists, contortionists, and clowns in swallow-tailed coats had astounded the audience. Now, tails to trunks, the circus’s thirty-one Asian elephants trotted into the center ring. Shimmering in purple and gold sequins, they rose up on their hind legs balanced on balls and formed a pyramid. Their trainer clapped his hands. Once more grabbing one another’s tails, they trotted back into the wings just as a trumpet sounded.
Jumbo flapped his ears. Slowly the red velvet curtain rose toward the ceiling.
The mighty elephant at last appeared.
The audience gasped and began clapping wildly. “Jumbo! Hello, Jumbo! Over here!” they cried.
Jumbo rolled his massive head from side to side. He swung his trunk. Then with Matthew Scott leading the way, he plodded around the center ring three times. That was all. He didn’t balance on a ball. He didn’t wear a single sequin. “It is enough just to marvel at him,” Barnum once explained.
And it was.
On their feet now, the excited audience threw bags of candy, fruits, and nuts into the center ring. “We love you, Jumbo! Hooray for Jumbo!”
Like always, Jumbo knelt and picked up one of the treats with his trunk. Brandishing it about, he acknowledged the crowd’s generosity before popping it into his mouth.
The audience roared its approval.
And Jumbo, his appearance over, moved toward the wings.
Behind him a little elephant named Tom Thumb scampered into the ring. He wore a pair of striped trousers and a top hat. Known as “the clown” because of the silly routines he’d been taught, Tom Thumb comically grabbed up the rest of the goodies and dropped them into buckets. Then he hurried offstage after Jumbo.
With the crowd still cheering, Matthew Scott led both Jumbo and Tom Thumb away from the tent and along the railroad tracks toward the waiting circus cars. To the group’s right stretched the Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson train. To their left a steep embankment sloped off into a field. Sandwiched into this narrow space, the group now walked along five hundred feet of track. Scott knew no trains were scheduled to use the track that night. Railwaymen had assured circus workers that it would be safe to walk along this stretch. Still, Scott felt uneasy. If a train did come along, there would be no easy way to escape. He tapped Jumbo’s haunches with his open hand, urging the elephant to hurry.
Suddenly the keeper heard the distant rumble of a locomotive. Realizing the danger, he struggled to turn the elephants left. But they were afraid of the embankment and refused to climb down it. Frantic now, the shrill whistle of the train directly behind them, Scott slapped Jumbo’s flank hard. Turning the elephants around, he began running them back toward the end of the circus train. He hoped to reach its end and pass around the front in time.
The oncoming train rounded a curve, its glaring yellow light blinding them. Panicked, Jumbo trumpeted.
The train’s engineer spotted the danger on the track. But he could do nothing to stop his locomotive. Hydraulic brakes had not been invented. All he could do was slam the train into reverse.
Wheels screeched.
Orange sparks flew.
Then . . . a sickening thud as the train plowed into the elephants. It struck Tom Thumb first. Scooping up the little pachyderm in its cowcatcher, it tossed him sideways onto the embankment. Tom Thumb screamed with pain as his front left leg shattered.
Jumbo was still running for his life when the train caught up to him just moments later. Because of his immense size, it was impossible for Jumbo to be thrown clear of the tracks. Instead train and elephant skidded together. The impact brought the train to a stop, derailing both its engine and its first boxcar. Scott, who had managed to leap to safety at the last second, was unharmed. But Jumbo lay dying.
Scrambling over the wreckage, Scott hurried to his elephant’s side. Recalled one eyewitness, “The animal reached out his long trunk, wrapped it around the trainer, and drew him down to where his majestic head lay blood-stained in the cinders.” Scott stroked Jumbo’s face and murmured comforting words as the elephant drew one last, shuddering breath. Then Jumbo fell silent. Flinging himself onto the elephant’s body, Scott sobbed uncontrollably. He lay there clutching Jumbo’s motionless trunk.
Barnum heard the news hours later. “Poor Scott,” he exclaimed to a newspaperman. “I don’t know what he’ll do without Jumbo . . . Jumbo was all the world to him.” Still, the showman never let sentimentality interfere with business. He immediately sent a taxidermist named Henry Ward to the accident site. “Lose no time in saving [Jumbo’s] skin and skeleton,” he instructed.
Back in St. Thomas, circus workers labored to move Jumbo’s body off the track. One hundred men with ropes and poles heaved and pushed for almost an hour before finally managing to tip the body of their greatest star onto the embankment. Then they set Tom Thumb’s leg in a splint, packed up their equipment, and climbed aboard their train. Knowing “the show must go on,” they chugged toward the next town on their tour.
As the sun rose, news of the accident spread. Crowds gathered to gape at the immense body. Local photographers took pictures. And so many souvenir hunters pulled hairs from Jumbo’s tail, or chipped slivers of ivory from his tusk, that a fence was eventually built to protect the corpse. All the while Scott grieved beside his elephant. He didn’t seem to notice all the commotion. For the first morning in twenty years, he didn’t feed, bathe, or play with his beloved Jummie.
By that evening, news of Jumbo’s death had been telegraphed around the world. In New York the Times headline blared, “The Great Jumbo Killed.” In London the Daily Telegraph’s front page mourned, “Sad End of Jumbo.” Obituaries appeared in newspapers all across the country. “Born in Africa in 1861, died at St. Thomas, September 15, 1885, aged 24 years,” read one. “The pet of thousands and friend of all.”
On the morning of September 17—less than thirty-six hours after Jumbo’s death—taxidermist Henry Ward arrived in St. Thomas. He’d brought along two assistants to help with the job. But as soon as he saw the massive corpse, he knew he was understaffed. So he quickly hired six local butchers to carve up the carcass. It took them two days to remove the nearly four tons of meat from Jumbo’s bones. (It was sold to a nearby meatpacking plant.) Now with just the skin, bones, and viscera remaining, Ward and his assistants began the preservation process. Standing inside the elephant’s huge body, they painstakingly scraped the skin and bones clean. Buckets full of muscle tissue and other viscera were carried from the body to a nearby bonfire, where they were burned. For days St. Thomas “smelled like roasted elephant,” recalled one citizen. Jumbo’s heart, which weighed fifty pounds, was shipped off to Cornell University. Slices of his tusk were sent to both the British Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. And casts were made of his teeth, showing that at the time of his death, Jumbo was still growing. Most surprising were the contents of the elephant’s stomach. When Ward sliced it open, he found hundreds of coins, a handful of keys, several rivets, and a policeman’s silver whistle. “Jumbo was a bank all by himself,” he declared.
After three days’ work, the elephant’s skin and bones were ready to be moved to Ward’s laboratory at the University of Rochester in New York. Here the hide was scraped to an even thickness, tanned, and stretched over a Jumbo-size wooden frame. The bones were bleached and reassembled.
When the Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson Circus opened for the 1886 season, it had a new and gruesome exhibit: the “double Jumbo.” At every performance, the elephant’s hide and skeleton were placed next to each other on a wagon. Then the wagon was pulled around the big top, followed by a long line of the circus’s regular elephants. The elephants had been trained to carry gigantic, black-bordered handkerchiefs with their trunks and to stop every few minutes to dab at their eyes. It was a season-long funeral for Jumbo.