10

The Elephant in the Archive 1

Nigel Rothfels

In a warehouse belonging to Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City is a carefully wrapped relief sculpture of an elephant who was known as Princess Alice. The work was unveiled in August 1931, fifteen years after the elephant herself came to Utah and just a couple of weeks after the zoo moved from a city park to its new grounds at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. For over eighty years, the sculpture adorned the front of the old elephant house, and when the building was finally razed in 2012, the relief was kept with the hope that it might be used again on a future elephant building. When Alice arrived in Salt Lake City as a purchase from the Sells Floto Circus in 1916, she was pregnant with her fourth calf, and Prince Utah was born at the end of April 1918.2 The young elephant only lived for eleven months but Alice survived decades more and died in 1953. Knowing that the sculpture on the front of the elephant house was modelled on a real elephant who had once lived at the zoo was one of those facts that a kid knows because his school class got a special tour of the zoo. When I was growing up and visiting the zoo in the 1970s, I used to look up at the sculpture of Alice above the lion-mouth drinking fountain. The sculpture made me wonder about an elephant’s life. Along with the building itself, the sculpture is part of a particular elephant’s archival legacy.

Over the many years that I have been researching and writing about animals and history, I have been particularly interested in exploring the records of elephant pasts. I have looked for them in both more and less traditional places. On the more traditional front, I have read accounts of elephants reaching back to classical times, including some well-known accounts and other fairly obscure ones. Among the former are works by Pliny, Buffon, Brehm, Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, and Cynthia Moss. Among more obscure accounts is a remarkable compendium of elephant knowledge published in Germany in 1715 called Elephantographia curiosa by Georg Christoph Petri von Hartenfels, a work purporting to contain everything then known about elephants. But I have also sought elephants in less traditional archives. I have photographed elephant bones in off-exhibit collections of natural history museums in Europe and the US, I have worked in the archives of zoos and circuses. I have researched sculptures of elephants, like Alice, on buildings, and I have spent time with elephant keepers and with elephants.3

It was in 2005 that I first heard of Ned. At the time, I had been regularly checking in on a blog authored by William “Buckles” Woodcock Jr., a retired elephant trainer whose family had been in the American circus business for over 150 years.4 Buckles posted what to me seemed an amazing photograph (Figure 10.1).

The image was taken some time between 1915 and 1921 on the M. L. Clark and Son’s Circus, a show led by Mack Loren Clark that had roots reaching back to the mid-1880s. In 1895, Clark owned a small medicine show that travelled from town to town in the American Southeast putting on minstrel shows and selling elixirs. In an effort to bring in more people, Clark purchased a Bactrian camel and a small female Asian elephant, allegedly from Carl Hagenbeck, a famed animal dealer in Germany. The animals were delivered by train to Mena, Arkansas, and Clark decided, so the story goes, to name the elephant Mena. The show was on the road every year from early spring to late fall and wintered in Alexandria, Louisiana. At the end of the 1903 season with audiences growing, Clark purchased some horses, equipment, and a second elephant, named Ned, from a certain William F. Smith, who had been proprietor of a circus that toured the Northeast from 1901 to 1903 under three different names—the Great Syndicate Shows, then the Great Eastern Shows, and then Howe’s Great London Circus. The last was a name that had been and would continue to be used for a whole series of enterprises; name recognition has always been part of the circus business. This second elephant for the Clark circus was a male of unclear age (as young as five and as old as fourteen), who had, it is claimed, originally come from Siam (Thailand) by way of the New York animal dealer Louis Ruhe in either 1901 or 1902. Preparing for the 1904 season, Clark purchased a larger tent that would accommodate two rings and much bigger audiences. The circus continued to grow, and by 1910, M. L. Clark and Son’s travelled on more than sixty wagons. It had eighteen cages for animals, over two hundred horses, and a 120-foot round-top main tent.5

The two big elephants—Mena and Ned—would walk along with the wagons as the circus slowly moved about the South. Other circuses began to use trucks and trains; the Clarks ended up experimenting with both, but they kept coming back to the wagons. One of the advantages of the trains was that they allowed the larger circuses to skip the small towns and visit farther-flung, mostly larger cities where they might have multi-day stands. The Clark circus, though, moved from small town to small town on dirt and mud roads. Travelling in the evenings or overnight, the circus would be in a new town every day where it would put on one or two shows in the afternoon. The elephants would walk along with the wagons and work around the lots, raising the tent poles, pulling up the canvas, and moving wagons around the yard by pushing with their heads or pulling with harnesses.

In the photograph (Figure 10.1), Ned stands prominently and massively, chained to the older Mena. To the side of Ned, in front of Mena, and holding a whip in his right hand is one of the workers with his stock horse. Behind the group, we can see a wagon, hitches of horses, and a Bactrian camel. The image is the sort of staged marketing shot one finds in old circus route books and programs and seems to have been intended to show what life on the road looked like for the circus. The animals and people seem relaxed and the whole picture has a quiet quality. When I saw it, I wanted to know more about both of the elephants, but I was particularly drawn to Ned because there were just not that many large male elephants travelling with circuses in the early decades of the twentieth century. I wanted to know how he was able to cope with circus life—a challenge for any elephant but often a particular challenge for male elephants. To make a long story about elephant physiology and training techniques short, male elephants in the twentieth century often struggled with the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social constraints of living in circuses and zoos. Their basic physiology, their usual ways of living in the world, their huge size, and how they were generally acquired as very young animals, set most male elephants up for lives filled with conflict and difficulty. Of course, there were exceptions, and it is clearly not the case that every day these animals lived was one of torture and pain. Ned and elephants like him had good days, but it was still fairly easy for me to guess when I saw that first picture of him, that Ned was likely to have had many difficulties living in North America in the early twentieth century. From the chains alone, it was clear that he was becoming a handful and looking at the photograph I couldn’t help but wonder about what happened to him.

But where does one start researching the life of an elephant like Ned? One thing I had going for me was simply his distinctiveness. While it is true that every elephant looks different from every other, it can often be difficult to tell them apart if you don’t know them personally. A tusked male Asian elephant, however, tends to stand out, even in a crowd of elephants. And, as much as Ned stands out in historical photographs, he also stood out for people who saw him, so there is more of a written record of his travels in newspapers, memoirs, and other sources. Historians of the circus have paid attention to him, too. Of the thousands of modern elephants that have lived in North America, probably fewer than a hundred have received sustained attention in articles and books, and Ned is one of them.

But the existence of historical records presents other problems. In introducing Ned and Mena above, I used expressions like “allegedly,” and “the story goes,” and “it is claimed,” because although the basic biographies of these elephants have been told many times, the details are always a little different, and it is difficult to fact-check any of them. For example, at some point along the line, someone said that Clark purchased Mena from Hagenbeck, that Hagenbeck shipped the elephant from Germany, and that she arrived in a box car in Mena, Arkansas, leading to her being named Mena. The Hagenbeck records are spotty, but the company does have some surviving account books that tracked transactions with institutions and individuals. Alas, there are no records of Hagenbeck ever selling anything to Clark, let alone an elephant. Similarly, a group of camels associated with Clark are also attributed to Hagenbeck. The claim is that Clark picked them up from Hagenbeck after the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where Hagenbeck had a large exhibit. Again, there are no records of such a purchase, but it seems that Hagenbeck lost control of all the animals he exhibited in St. Louis to apparently unscrupulous American partners.6 Part of the problem in the cases of Mena and the Hagenbeck camels is that the name “Hagenbeck” meant something in the first decades of the twentieth century, even in an American context because of a travelling circus bearing the name and articles that appeared in the American press about the world-renowned German animal dealer. Wherever Clark got these animals, then, there would have been good reasons for him to say he bought them from Hagenbeck because saying so raised the credibility of his whole operation. He may in fact have purchased them from Hagenbeck or from one of Hagenbeck’s agents, but he may not have, too. As for where Mena got her name; well, the story has appeal, but that’s all I can really say.

The facts surrounding the importation of Ned present similar problems. Gus Knudson, director of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle from 1922 to 1947, wrote to Louis Ruhe and Sons in 1932 to confirm details about the elephant and received word that the company did not have any record of selling an elephant to someone named William F. Smith. But that did not mean they hadn’t. A company representative could only write: “We remember selling Elephants to Howe’s Great London Circus at various times, but we cannot trace any of these Elephants after so many years.”7 Given that the name “Howe’s Great London Circus” was used by a variety of different operations over decades, the letter from Ruhe and Sons does not help much. In the end, Knudson decided to accept the story that Ned had been sold by Ruhe and that he had been imported from Siam in 1902 at about the age of twelve, but no actual evidence of this appears to exist. Knudson’s decision was then accepted by others and so the story was passed down, again. But other histories are out there. The circus historian Homer Walton discussed Ned’s background in the 1950s with Lee Clark, the “Son” of M. L. Clark and Son’s Circus, and concluded that Ned was only five or six years old when the Clarks purchased him, not fourteen.8 Faced with the question myself, I have ended up accepting the younger age for Ned’s importation because it simply makes more sense from a logistical point of view. It was essentially always easier to ship a young elephant, and shipping a twelve-year-old male elephant from Asia to the US in 1900 would have been highly unusual.

In the end, it probably doesn’t matter very much how old Ned was when he was brought to the US, and it probably doesn’t matter either who managed to import him or Mena. But the uncertainties around their provenance point to larger problems with stories about circus elephants. The records are usually problematic in one way or another and often seem the result more of a desire for publicity than a commitment to getting the facts straight. This is certainly the case with Ned, about whom histories usually feel more like tall tales. A typical one, for example, is about the day in 1913 when he was put in a ring to fight bulls in Mexico. Completely contradictory versions of this story have been related over the years. There are accounts of Ned parrying the attacks of up to twenty bulls and others of him standing quietly while bull after bull tries desperately to escape the arena. So I went looking for contemporary accounts and eventually found similar versions of an article appearing in newspapers in the early summer of 1913 in towns around the Southeast. The papers included the Tensas Gazette of Saint Joseph, Louisiana, the Altoona Tribune of Altoona, Kansas, the Bucklin Banner of Bucklin, Kansas, the Madison Journal of Tallulah, Louisiana, and the Winston County Journal of Louisville, Mississippi. The problem with the article is that the more times I read it, the more it began to feel like something that could have been written by anyone, whether they saw the event or not. The version of the article that appeared in the Kansas Lyons Republican on 3 June 1913 led with the headline: “Bull in a Fight with an Elephant: Queer Combat Is Described by an American.”9 The “American” in question is someone named “Mr. H. F. Lang of Philadelphia.” There is no author attributed for this article—it is an anonymously written article by someone claiming to have heard a story about a spectacular fight between an elephant and a bull from someone else who claimed to have been there. If that is all one had, maybe one could be content. But forty-five years after the event, Lee Clark, who said he was there with Ned, shared quite a different version of the story. According to Clark, five bulls were successively brought out to fight Ned but none charged. Apparently, the circus was to get $2,500 and a print of a film of the fight, but because the audience was upset that there was no fight, Clark was arrested instead and fined $500. He was not put in jail, though, because no one else could handle the elephant, and in the middle of the night, he simply walked Ned back across the bridge to El Paso and never paid the fine.10 Should we believe versions of an article that appeared months after the supposed event took place published in newspapers from the very towns that the Clark circus regularly visited, and thus towns in which the circus would have wanted press? Or should we believe the story told by Lee Clark, who would have had his own reasons for remembering and telling the story in ways that made him look like he was the only reasonable person around on the day the events supposedly took place? This one is a tough call.

Returning to Ned’s story, as best as I can tell, he was owned by M. L. Clark for eighteen years, from the fall 1903 to July 1921. According to most accounts, the Clarks were increasingly struggling with the elephant, and another circus, which travelled on rail with a home in California, wanted the huge animal. Or maybe just the price was right? In any case, Ned was sold to the Al G. Barnes Circus for $6,000 and, we are told, he had to crawl on his knees to enter a train car in Seligman, Missouri, because he was simply too big to stand up in a standard car.11 When Ned joined the Barnes circus in Minnesota (or perhaps in Wisconsin or elsewhere, because knowledgeable accounts vary), his name was changed to Tusko and a whole new (and, again, often shifting) biography was invented for the elephant advertised as “The Mightiest of Living Creatures.” In one account, for example, Barnes claims that Tusko had been working in a lumber camp in Tibet when he was found by an animal dealer who sent the elephant’s measurements to Barnes. Claiming that the measurements he received would have made Tusko the largest elephant ever captured and perhaps the largest elephant in the world, Barnes bought the elephant sight unseen and had him shipped to the US. (A reminder: this is an elephant who had already been walking around the US for decades.) After spending some time with the elephant, Barnes concluded that Tusko was “no ordinary elephant, but that he breeds back to the mastodon strain.”12

Like the Clarks, Barnes, too, had ways of amplifying stories about his elephant, an elephant he constantly promoted to greater fame. When Tusko, therefore, got loose in the countryside near the town of Sedro-Woolley in the Skagit Valley of Washington state in 1922, there was no downside for Barnes in making sure that a maximum amount of violence and damage was reported in newspapers across the country—even in the New York Times. Over the following months, published accounts of the “rampage” provided ever more details and damage estimates rose from a couple of thousand dollars to as much as $75,000. As for Tusko, the exaggerations continued apace. Before long, newspapers reported that the circus had acquired the monster for the staggering cost of $100,000, that the elephant’s age was “reckoned well along in the hundreds,” and that he weighed over 20,000 lbs.13 The stories of Tusko became so important to the circus that when the decision was finally reached that it was just too dangerous to take him on the road, Barnes decided he needed to buy another large male elephant, named Diamond, whom he quickly renamed Tusko. People came, saw a large, tusked elephant, and were satisfied that they had seen the real Tusko. It was—one should note—Diamond and not Tusko who would eventually kill a bystander.

In tracking the path of Ned/Tusko, I kept finding what appeared as objective, carefully researched records that somehow always boiled down to being just something someone said at some point. For example, the Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, holds a collection of elephant biographies compiled by Charles W. “Chang” Reynolds (1933–86). The card for “Tusko (Ned) #963” (Figure 10.2) is the sort of document that historians love. Even though it does not have that much information, its organization just feels credible. I took a photo and then dutifully entered the data into a spreadsheet with the expectation that I would expand upon it as I found out more. There was just something about the card that pulled me in. Maybe it was how the card for #963 rested in a stack with hundreds of other cards; maybe it was the typeface of the typewriter. Whatever the case, I was quickly convinced that the information must somehow be accurate and objective.

At another point in my research, this time in the Municipal Archives in Seattle, Washington, I found similarly compelling documents put together in 1932–33 by Gus Knudson, then director of the zoo. My guess is that the documents were the result of an effort to learn as much about Tusko’s past as possible, because the zoo and the city were facing a lawsuit over the animal. Knudson assembled a list of men who had handled Tusko over the years and wrote letters requesting any information people might have about Tusko’s past. In the end, from information he gleaned from a variety of sources, he settled on a document with eleven numbered paragraphs outlining Tusko’s life. He concluded: “Have spent considerable time and seen different people in tracing this history down, and I think I have secured a true story. Dr. Gus Knudson, Director Zoological Division, Seattle Park Department.”14 He expanded on this document with a two-and-a-quarter-page “History of Tusko, the Indian Elephant.” The names and dates are echoed in other documents I have found and seem generally reasonable, but as more details entered the Knudson account, the less reliable it became. Knudson, for example, writes:

Tusko was taken on the road in the spring of 1923 and 1924. In 1924, while showing in Sedro Woolley, Wash., Tusko ran amuck. It was at the beginning of the fourth performance, all the trappings had been placed on Tusko and a ladder leaned against his side to enable his rider to mount, for even Tusko knelt to the ground, a ladder was required with which to board him. When the rider, Mr. Peck, was almost half way up the ladder, Tusko suddenly rebelled. He jumped to his feet, throwing Mr. Peck and the ladder aside, and began backing up, swinging his head and trunk from side to side. His long tusks and huge size made him a frightful object, while his bellows of rage were terrifying. The people scattered in all directions in a panic.15

In the first sentence of this extract, Knudson tries to present some basic, albeit incorrect, facts—the events in Sedro Woolley occurred 1922 not 1924. But then the tone switches entirely as he relates an exciting account of what happened that night. This part of the text derives almost entirely from an interview conducted with Barnes nine years after the events, where much of what he says is preposterous, and from various newspaper articles that seem likely to have been at least partially written by Barnes’ own people. Even the name “Peck” is a fiction. Although Knudson was clearly making a serious effort to record the facts about Ned/Tusko, the layers of stories upon stories make telling the actual life experiences of the elephant a serious challenge.

Still, concluding that Ned/Tusko’s story is difficult to research should really not be that much of a surprise. Writing about any historical event or figure presents similar problems with the reliability of sources, the difficulty of being confident that events actually happened in the way they have been described, the task of deciding which moments in a life to highlight. These are the challenges that make writing history interesting and difficult, and why history is always an iterative process as later scholars learn more and challenge or refine earlier accounts. There are, of course, specific complexities in working with archival materials about animals. Indeed, as Jason Colby has made clear, even when “sources are abundant,” they have been preserved, overlaid, and reinterpreted by the humans who have retained them. The biography of Ned/Tusko, like that of Colby’s Tuffy or Emily Wakild’s llama, Spook, will be built largely, but not always exclusively, from accounts, records, and materials preserved by humans.16

It isn’t that animals are not in the archives. As Harriet Ritvo notes, “archives are full of animals, as have been the societies that they—however imperfectly—reflect and preserve.”17 Once we begin to look, we find remarkably rich records left by animals in the past, and many of those are records created by or made up of the animals themselves. Still, most of the remains of animals in most of the archives that we create are curated in one way or another. Alice on the front of a building in Salt Lake City is a representation by human hands; the skulls of the elephants that Theodore Roosevelt shot during his 1909 safari have been retained, conserved, and placed in a row of other skulls in a storage facility in Maryland to tell a particular human story, not the elephants’ story; a collection of trilobites is organized to show overall taxonomic diversity over thousands of millennia rather than the immediate circumstances in which an individual creature died and left a record in Permian sands; an account of a gorilla attack will always be much more of an account of human thoughts than animal ones. Nevertheless, although the difficulties of recovering the presence of actual animals in the past are real, that does not mean the work is impossible or not worth trying to do. Historians interested in the lives of animals recognize that the records they use are essentially just like most other historical documents. Working hard with them to discover what happened in the past, and then trying to figure out what that past tells us about today, remain the tasks that all historians do, whether they focus on animal lives or not.

Consider a slightly different example. A few years ago I was contacted by a scientist studying the bones of an elephant sold to an American zoo by Hagenbeck at the beginning of the twentieth century. The scientist was interested in this particular elephant because there was documentation indicating where the elephant was originally captured, and that was an important piece of information for the research. The problem from my perspective as a historian is that while it is true that Hagenbeck told the director of the zoo that he had acquired the elephant in Assam, it is also true that Hagenbeck had good reason to say that regardless of the elephant’s true origins. At the time, most Western zoo directors were convinced that the largest and so-called “highest caste” elephants in India came from Assam. By claiming, then, that this elephant came from that region, Hagenbeck could increase the potential value of his elephant knowing full well that it would be difficult to prove the animal’s origins one way or the other. The elephant, of course, may well have come from Assam, but Hagenbeck was often accused of misrepresentation and there are good reasons to be skeptical of his account in this case. All I could really tell the scientist is that it is certainly possible that the elephant came from Assam, but it is far from certain that he did. That is a truer biography of this elephant than just saying, “we know this elephant came from Assam because that is what the documentation says.”

In his final years as a circus elephant, and then as a stand-alone spectacle dragged from town-to-town in the Pacific Northwest affixed to a flatbed trailer, Ned/Tusko became perhaps most famous for the 1,000 lbs of chains that he often carried on his body. The chains prevented him from using his head, trunk, or legs to lash out, and when he was asked to walk, he could do so only slowly. Much of the time, each of his legs was chained to a stake driven deep in the ground. Ned/Tusko—an elephant who came to the US at the beginning of the twentieth century, who walked thousands of miles alongside Mena on the Clark show—became a chained monster, an exhibition of punishment. So many times, as I have looked at photographs of Ned/Tusko walking down a street in his chains, I could not help but feel he was on his way to his own execution. There were undoubtedly people who laughed when they saw him chained up, but it seems many were struck by what they saw as a spectacle of tragedy. Again, stories were put on top of older stories.

In an ending that could only happen in the context of American ideas about elephants from a century ago, Ned/Tusko’s life did not actually end while being exhibited in a circus or in a rented barn on the outskirts of town. On 8 October 1932, Ned/Tusko was moved to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle where he became a major attraction. The story told at the time—and ever since—was that he was saved by the zoo. And in a way he was. At the height of the Depression and no longer part of a large circus, the elephant travelled with just one handler and was exhibited for a dime. At that rate, it was difficult to earn enough money to feed them both. Woodland Park offered a refuge as much for Ned/Tusko’s handler as for the elephant. The zoo, claiming to have rescued Ned/Tusko, started a fund-drive to help pay for his food, but eight months after he arrived at the zoo, Ned/Tusko died at about thirty-five years old. People described him as an old elephant, but he was really quite young.

The expression “an elephant in the room” points to an issue that is clearly present but ignored because it is somehow too uncomfortable or too difficult to discuss. However difficult it might be to uncover the elephant in the archive, I believe that making the effort to do so can teach us a great deal about elephants and ourselves. Part of what distinguishes good historical writing is skepticism about sources and the realization that materials in any archive—in a book, a museum, an album of photographs, a stack of “elephant biographies,” or a zoo-keeper’s memory—can be both more and less than they appear. What one sees on the surface of the document, the story it appears to tell, is only one layer covering a history of earlier stories each told (or never told) for different reasons. At one point in researching the story of Ned/Tusko, for example, I found a cartoon in a newspaper showing the elephant reeling to face the charge of an infuriated bull in an arena in Mexico. The drawing was not a record of what happened; it was a record of what someone imagined might happen if an elephant ever fought a bull. I cannot be certain about what happened that Sunday in February 1913, when Ned crossed the border from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez. What I can know, though, is that the stories of what happened that day became part of the legend of Ned, part of what led him on his curious path through several decades of American history. The stories of Ned are not Ned, but they help explain much of what happened to him and help us better understand the history of how we have thought about elephants.

Notes

1 My thanks to the organizers, sponsors, and participants in the “Traces of the Animal Past” conference for the opportunity to be part of the discussion that led to this essay.

2 See Utah: A Guide to the State. Compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Utah (New York: Hastings, [1941] 1945), 254–55.

3 This essay presents some of the research problems I faced in one of the chapters for my book, Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). For related work I have done about elephants, see Nigel Rothfels and Dick Blau, Elephant House (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015); Rothfels, “Mammoths in the Landscape,” in Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, ed. Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin (London: Routledge, 2014), 10–22; and Rothfels, “Elephants, Ethics, and History,” Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence, ed. Chris Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 100–19.

4 I have written more about the Woodcock-Orton family history in Nigel Rothfels, “A Hero’s Death,” in Animal Acts: Performing Species Now, ed. Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 182–88; and Rothfels, “Why Look at Elephants?,” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9, no. 2 (2005): 166–83.

5 See Homer C. Walton, “The M. L. Clark Wagon Show,” Bandwagon 9, no. 2 (March-April 1965): 4–11; and Homer C. Walton, “Ned and Mena, Famous Elephants,” Bandwagon 2, no. 6 (November-December, 1958): 7.

6 I discuss the exhibition in St. Louis and its legacies on the American circus business in Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

7 “Louis Ruhe, Inc. to Dr. Gus Knudson, Director,” November 28, 1932, Woodland Park Zoo History File, Record Series 8601-01, Tusko Misc. Correspondence, 1932–1934, Box 15, Folder 4, Seattle Municipal Archives.

8 Walton, “Ned and Mena, Famous Elephants.”

9 “Bull in a Fight with an Elephant,” Lyons Republican, June 3, 1913, 3.

10 See Walton, “The M. L. Clark Wagon Show.”

11 Richard J. Reynolds, III, “Hold Your Horses, Here Come the Elephants!” presented at the Regional Workshop of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, Knoxville, TN, 1979.

12 “What Happened When Tusko Went on a Rampage, As Told to Dave Roberson by Al G. Barnes,” Typescript, Woodland Park Zoo History File, Record Series 8601-01, Tusko the Elephant Early Histories, Box 15, Folder 3, Seattle Municipal Archives.

13 See, for example, “What Happened When the Elephant ‘Took a Notion,’” Salt Lake Telegram, June 25, 1922, 29.

14 Gus Knudson, “History of Tusko,” Typescript, Woodland Park Zoo History File, Record Series 8601-01, Tusko the Elephant Early Histories, Box 15, Folder 3, Seattle Municipal Archives.

15 Gus Knudson, “History of Tusko: The Indian Elephant,” Typescript, Woodland Park Zoo History File, Record Series 8601-01, Tusko the Elephant Early Histories, Box 15, Folder 3, Seattle Municipal Archives.

16 See articles in this volume by Jason M. Colby, “Tuffy’s Cold War: Science, Memory and the US Navy’s Dolphin”; and Emily Wakild, “What’s a Guanaco? Tracing the Llama Diaspora through and beyond South America.”

17 Harriet Ritvo, “Epilogue: Combinations and Conjunction,” this volume.