The history of the American circus is so rich that I plucked many of this story’s most outrageous details from fact or anecdote (in circus history, the line between the two is famously blurred). These include the display of a hippo pickled in formaldehyde, a deceased four-hundred-pound “strong lady” being paraded around town in an elephant cage, an elephant who repeatedly pulled her stake and stole the lemonade, another elephant who ran off and was retrieved from a backyard vegetable patch, a lion and a dishwasher wedged together under a sink, a general manager who was murdered and his body rolled up in the big top, and so on. I also incorporated the horrific and very real tragedy of Jamaica ginger paralysis, which devastated the lives of approximately one hundred thousand Americans between 1930 and 1931.
And finally, I’d like to draw attention to two old-time circus elephants, not just because they inspired major plot points, but also because these old girls deserve to be remembered.
In 1903 an elephant named Topsy killed her trainer after he fed her a lit cigarette. Most circus elephants at the time were forgiven a killing or two—as long as they didn’t kill a rube—but this was Topsy’s third strike. Topsy’s owners at Coney Island’s Luna Park decided to turn her execution into a public spectacle, but the announcement that they were going to hang her met with uproar—after all, wasn’t hanging a cruel and unusual punishment? Ever resourceful, Topsy’s owners contacted Thomas Edison. For years, Edison had been “proving” the dangers of rival George Westinghouse’s alternating current by publicly electrocuting stray dogs and cats, along with the occasional horse or cow—but nothing as ambitious as an elephant. He accepted the challenge. Because the electric chair had replaced the gallows as New York’s official method of execution, the protests stopped.
Accounts differ as to whether Topsy was fed cyanide-laced carrots in an early, failed, execution attempt or whether she ate them immediately before she was electrocuted, but what is not disputed is that Edison brought a movie camera, had Topsy strapped into copper-lined sandals, and shot sixty-six hundred volts through her in front of fifteen hundred spectators, killing her in about ten seconds. Edison, convinced that this feat discredited alternating current, went on to show the film to audiences across the country.
On to a less sobering note. Also in 1903, an outfit in Dallas acquired an elephant named Old Mom from Carl Hagenbeck, a circus legend who declared her to be the smartest elephant he’d ever had. Their hopes thus raised, Old Mom’s new trainers were dismayed to find they could persuade her to do nothing more than shuffle around. Indeed, she was so useless she “had to be pushed and pulled from one circus lot to another.” When Hagenbeck later visited Old Mom at her new home, he was aggrieved to hear her described as stupid and said so—in German. It suddenly dawned on everyone that Old Mom only understood German. After this watershed, Old Mom was retrained in English and went on to an illustrious career. She died in 1933 at the ripe old age of eighty, surrounded by her friends and fellow troupers.
Here’s to Topsy and Old Mom—