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c h a p t e r t w o Becoming an Elephant “Actor” One night in 1820, a small traveling menagerie made its way along the road leading to the village of Plymouth, Vermont, where it was scheduled to give a show in the barn beside the Lakin Hotel. Caged animals, keepers, and horses in tow, the small wagon train also included a young male elephant. The next morning, children from nearby farms went out to inspect the road, hoping to find “the tracks of the huge beast.” Indeed, his exhibitors claimed he was over nine feet tall, weighing at least three tons, and “one third larger than the female which was shot at Alfred.”1 In fact, this elephant was outmatched by his reputation, one resident remembered: There had been a little spatter of rain in the night, . . . and it was easy to see where he had passed along by a line of distinct footprints. But that could only be one side of him, we thought, and we hunted the road over for the tracks that should have been made by the opposite pair of feet. We were finally made to admit that the one line of tracks, showing a breadth not much greater than is made by the tracks of a horse, was all there was of it, and my imagination of the magnitude of the hugest of created beasts received a decided corrective.2 To be sure, he had no way of living up to the expectations of his youngest fans because, although the first bull elephant in America, he was a juvenile like those who had come before him.3 He had arrived in New York City in late November 1819 on a ship from Bombay called Horatio. Abraham Roblin, a speculator like Jacob Crowninshield, had purchased the young male and named him after the ship to remind customers of the elephant’s journey to the United States.4 Roblin quickly sold the elephant to a group of men who had assembled a small traveling menagerie, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Campbell, from Windsor, Connecticut, and the Emerson brothers, of Norwich, Connecticut.5 These Connecticut investors, after considering the earlier fame of the young female elephants who had traveled the United States, began marketing Horatio in some novel ways. Although they presented him comprehensibly as a “Natural Curiosity,” the group also explained to their customers that Horatio was an exotic visitor trained for service to humans. Shipped from Poona near Bombay “at great 40 Entertaining Elephants expense and risk,” they said, Horatio was a spoil of war captured from an Indian monarch, “one of the Maharatta chiefs,” who had recently resisted British colonial authorities in India. His main trick was to kneel down so that a person could climb upon his back. Elephants in India have done this for centuries, so the act may have been routine to a South Asian or Anglo-Indian viewer. In the early republic , however, that or any directed elephant behavior seemed extraordinary to spectators—at least on first inspection—because it demonstrated the puzzling contrast between Horatio’s physicality and his advertised “most perfect subjection ” to human command. Thus did Horatio’s owners assure the public that, although an elephant of war, Horatio was happy to be their pet. Encouraging a naïvely custodial attitude toward the elephant, they tempted the public: “Any person may approach him and lay their hands upon him without the least danger.”6 Then, not long after Horatio’s sale, the Connecticut group contacted Roblin to ask for help, saying that both they and their hired handlers were “unable to control him.” By September 19, the menagerie was at Westmoreland, Vermont, attempting to cross a bridge over the Connecticut River. Finding the gate at the far end of the structure closed, Horatio and the menagerie’s various riders and wagons stood on the bridge while someone ran to find a townsman to open it. Once the gate was swung aside, Horatio refused to move. Curtis and an unnamed keeper on horseback “advanced and were in the act of spurring him forward with their whips,” yet once again Horatio either did not get their point or was simply refusing it. He began leaning on the bridge’s railing and pressed so hard that the railing post snapped off, taking a portion of the bridge deck with it. “The Elephant , the two horses and their riders [plunged] . . . together with the falling timbers and planks a distance of...

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