Here’s one you probably don’t know:
Which came first, the Revolutionary War or the first elephant in America?
Think April 13, 1796.
That’s the day Capt. Jacob Crowninshield of Salem, MA, unloaded
an Asian elephant from Calcutta in New York City. He sold it to a showman for
$10,000 (almost $180,000 in current dollars).
President John Adams and crowds of Americans flocked to see “Old
Bet,” a 2-year-old female who grandly toured throughout the United States for
the next nine years. President Thomas Jefferson told Lewis and Clark to be on
the lookout for “elephantine mammoths” as the hardy explorers were scouting new
routes through the American West.
The exhibition of “Old Bet” was such a marvelous spectacle
that folks who saw her talked about “seeing the elephant,” and even the folks
who were waiting to see her—or missed the opportunity—helped to add those
mundane words to the American lexicon. Later, Civil War soldiers added the
darker dimension to the phrase as we know it today, when they guardedly
recounted the grisly horror of combat with a sanitized acknowledgment that they
had “seen the elephant.”
Elephants and circuses are as American as apple pie. Almost
100 years after “Old Bet,” P. T. Barnum did his fantastic best to promote “Jumbo,”
a 12-foot-tall African elephant who weighed in at about 12,000 pounds.
Too bad that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey
Circus announced this week that the troupe of 13 elephants now appearing with
its traveling shows will be retired in the next few years, and won’t be
replaced.
When you were a kid, did you “see the elephant”? And, hey,
did you get to do the elephant ride when the circus came to your town?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber
2015
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