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
No comments:
Post a Comment