DATE: 1885.
WHAT IT IS: The remains of the famous nineteenth-century circus elephant.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The bones are currently disassembled.
Six tons of walking, breathing bulk, he stood a towering eleven and a half feet tall and drew cheering, adoring crowds wherever he stomped his thunderous legs. Trapped in the wilds of Africa, Jumbo was the bush elephant that captured the world’s imagination, only to meet a tragic fate when he lumbered into the path of modern technology.
Jumbo was born in freedom in the late 1850s on the continent of Africa. There are different accounts as to when and where he was captured, but most likely it was near a river in Abyssinia, which later became Ethiopia.
The gentle young animal landed in a Paris zoo, then was shipped across the English Channel to the London Zoo. The older he got, the more he ate. By the time he was seven, he was devouring gargantuan supplies of food, supposedly even including whiskey. Jumbo became huge.
As the floppy-eared beast was making a name for himself, he caught the attention of an American showman—Phineas Taylor Barnum. Born in 1810, Barnum achieved fame in the 1830s for displaying an elderly black woman slave he had purchased, whom he claimed was George Washington’s nurse. He had continued to make large sums of money exhibiting freaks such as the dwarf General Tom Thumb, or sponsoring talent like opera singer Jenny Lind, known as “the Swedish Nightingale.”
The celebrated showman, who fancied himself “the Shakespeare of advertising,” knew that the pachyderm would be a popular attraction for his Greatest Show on Earth. In a low-profile deal that created a storm of controversy, Barnum purchased Jumbo from the London Zoo for the then large sum of $10,000. The people of England were enraged that their beloved giant elephant had been taken from them—although one story has it that Jumbo had grown too violent to keep at the zoo, perhaps because he was suffering from the pain of an impacted wisdom tooth.
In America, Jumbo thrilled crowds, whether plodding up Broadway in a festive procession or in the Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson circus shows that toured the country. Displayed in the early 1880s, when the country was still recovering from the Civil War and the era of cowboys and Indians was drawing to a close, Jumbo was a lively diversion, a genuine wonder.
But in 1885, after only a few years on the new continent, the African bush elephant’s destiny became disastrously intertwined with the technology of the civilized world. At 9:30 on a mid-September evening, as a Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson performance was taking place in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, all thirty-one of the circus’s elephants save Jumbo and the dwarf elephant Tom Thumb had been loaded into their cars. These two were being led along a track by their caretaker, Mr. Scott, known as Scotty, to their cars. A freight train was heading their way, but only when it drew within five hundred yards were its lights visible to Scotty, and likewise the engineer couldn’t see the pachyderms on the track until it was too late. Mr. Scott urged the animals along, and while they did speed up, the train could not stop in time, despite the engineer summoning three times for the brakes. The train first struck Tom Thumb, then smashed into Jumbo from behind. Tom Thumb, hurled into a gully, was badly injured but survived the crash. Jumbo died fifteen minutes later, as workers were trying to free him from underneath the locomotive.
From the late nineteenth century to 1975, when his hide burned, Jumbo was displayed at Tufts University's Barnum Museum of Natural History, which later was renamed Barnum Hall and became the location of the school's biology department. A tradition had developed among biology students facing a difficult exam to stick a coin Jumbo's upturned trunk for good luck.
Even Jumbo’s death couldn’t stop the huckster Barnum from capitalizing on the animal’s fame. To keep Jumbo’s name in the headlines, Barnum invented stories of how Jumbo had heroically saved Tom Thumb even at the cost of his own life. Barnum had Jumbo stuffed—when Jumbo was cut open the technician found the enormous stomach full of everything from trinkets to coins—and his bones mounted at the famous Rochester, New York-based Professor Henry A. Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. He exhibited the mammoth preserved corpse in his traveling circus.
As Barnum’s business ventures took a different course, he donated Jumbo’s hide to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and his bones to the American Museum of Natural History. Over the years, Jumbo, in his stuffed reincarnation, lived on as the mascot of Tufts University. But even the beast’s effigy met a tragic fate. In 1975, the hide was consumed by a fire. Jumbo’s bones survive, however, a reminder of the nineteenth-century beast that captured the world’s imagination and whose name entered the English vocabulary as an adjective applied to anything very large.
LOCATION: American Museum of Natural History, New York City.