It would be a safe guess that ninety-nine per cent. of the children in our United States love and worship the American Circus, and well they may, for it is an American institution, developed by that great American genius, Mr. P. T. Barnum.
Even the kings and queens of Europe, who are supposed to see everything that is worth while, had never seen the American Circus until Mr. Barnum took his show across the Atlantic Ocean and exhibited in Europe.
One of the pleasant pictures of spring-time is that of an excited group of children, gathered about the latest circus poster. They stand with mouth agape, and eyes stretched wide open, while with their hands they gesticulate, trying vainly to express something of the mystery and wonder described upon the bill-board.
If the American circus is the delight of all the children and many of their elders as well, then the elephant is the very centre and circumference of the whole show. He is the chief figure in that great glittering pageant, the street parade. If the children feel strange thrills at the sound of the stirring circus bands, if they gaze in wonderment at the strange people in the parade, if their spinal columns feel delicious thrills of fear at the cages of wild animals, yet it is reserved for the elephants to register perfect ecstasy in the childish heart. The elephant is mighty, he steps with such stately tread, and there is such an air of mystery about his driver that he at onee strikes twelve in the ehildish mind. From the elephants, the parade gradually fades away to the vanishing point.
This being the case, is it not wise to preface this book with a short sketch of the elephant family, especially as there will be some important facts included in this introduction which will not be touched upon in the main portion of the story?
The elephant family has been in the past very important, and a very large family. There are about fourteen distinct species found in fossils and in prehistoric rocks. But now the family has dwindled to two species: the African and the Asiatic elephant.
Of these, the African is slightly the larger and much the more untamable. There are very few cases of African elephants fully domesticated. Jumbo, so long loved and admired by children, was the notable exception. The African elephant is usually rather taller and more rangy than the Asiatic, and his tusks are heavier. Also his ears are much larger, sometimes measuring three and a half feet in length by two and a half in width. Aside from these differences, the two living species of the elephant are quite alike. But the Asiatic elephant is the one we see in circuses and zoos.
There was another mighty elephant that lived upon the earth with primeval man, and is most interesting because of that fact. He was called the mammoth. A fine specimen of this mighty elephant was found a few years ago in Siberia frozen into a crevice in a glacier. He was so well preserved that the tissues of his flesh were all intact, and even his hair was well preserved.
This mighty elephant was two or three feet taller than the very largest elephants upon the earth to-day, and he probably weighed a half more. So that would make him thirteen or fourteen feet high and weighing perhaps ten tons. Truly a huge beast.
The other species most commonly found in fossils and about which we hear the most is the mastodon, that was even larger than the mammoth.
So, as you see, all the members of this family have been veritable giants.
The elephant is very long-lived, even in these days, living from seventy-five to one hundred and thirty years. No one knows how long his life might have been in the prehistoric ages.
He goes back to a very distant date in the history of man. Elephants were used in India in repelling the attacks of Alexander the Great.
Towers which contained thirty or forty bowmen were mounted upon the elephants' backs. But these great animals are rather timid in some ways, so they often bolted in battle and did their friends quite as much damage as they did their enemies.
Hannibal used elephants in his army which crossed the Pyrenees and the Alps mountains and so marched down into italy and attacked imperial Rome. The elephant, notwithstanding his size, is very sure-footed and a very good mountain-climber. This is because they formerly lived much farther north than they do now. So we see that the elephant was formerly domesticated and that he went into battle with his master. But, except in India, the art of capturing and training elephants seems to have been lost from about the time of the Christian Era till within the last century, when the elephant again became subservient to man.
The fact that the elephant once lived much farther north accounts in part for the theory that he was formerly covered with hair, but his living in the tropics has caused him to discard it as unnecessary.
This is probably why a baby elephant is born covered with a fine woolly hair, which he sheds when he is a few months old, and it never returns.
The female elephant gives birth to a baby elephant every three years after she is fifteen years old. This occurs until she is seventy-five, when she ceases to bear young. This would make the average female elephant the mother of from fifteen to twenty elephants.
The elephant does not gain his full size and weight until he is about twenty-five. When he is born, he is three feet high and weighs two hundred pounds. After that he grows an inch a month until he is five years old. Then the growth is slower.
The strangest of all the elephant's peculiar organs is his trunk, which one scientist says contains forty thousand muscles. Certain it is that he can use it in many ways. It is so powerful that he can lift hundreds of pounds of weight with it, and so delicate that he can pick up a pin from the floor. It is by means of the trunk that the elephant drinks. He can also suck in much more water than he wants for his immediate use and store it up in his water-stomach, which in a full-grown elephant holds ten gallons. This makes him a good traveller in waste places where water is not plenty. If he has a mind to, he can draw the water from his stomach into his trunk at any time, and take a drink, or even squirt it over himself, thus taking a shower-bath. But he does not usually waste the extra water which he has stored up in that way.
The elephant's tusks are formed of dentine, a very valuable tooth-covering. They are merely greatly elongated upper teeth, which in some cases curve down and then up at an angle of forty-five degrees. These tusks, which form the ivory that man prizes so highly, in the case of the African elephant often weigh two hundred pounds.
The ivory in a large set of tusks is worth hundreds of dollars, and sometimes even one or two thousand dollars. So the tuskers, as they are called, which are the bulls with the largest tusks, are usually shot as soon as they are captured. This is for two reasons. First, they are more valuable for ivory than for show purposes, and second, they are often rather hard to break, being stubborn.
Quite frequently a male elephant becomes estranged from the herd. He lives by himself and shuns the rest of the elephants. After a time, he becomes very morose and is a dangerous animal for a hunter to meet. Such an elephant is called a rogue.
The elephant has probably always been tamed in India where he is a sacred animal. The white elephant, especially, is regarded with great veneration. Also the twenty-toed elephant brings a fabulous price among the Indian princes. The usual complement of toes for the elephant is eighteen.
There was one white elephant in India many centuries ago which was so highly prized that two rival kingdoms got to waging war over him, and this war lasted for five generations of kings and cost thousands of lives.
The most dangerous thing about the elephant is his liability to must. This is a strange disease to which he is subject, and which makes him mad while it lasts. But its coming can be detected if the elephant-keeper is careful, so trouble can always be avoided. In the cheek-bones of the elephant there are two small holes from which flows a slight secretion. When the elephant is about to be taken with must, this vent gives off a fluid and also a musty odor. The elephant-keeper should each day make an inspection of this vent with a straw. If he discovers the musty smell, he should at once take preventive measures.
If the elephant is immediately hobbled, and then chained up he can do no damage. Usually the attack will pass after a while. But occasionally an elephant becomes so violent that he has to be shot.
The elephant's memory is marvelous. A doctor once lanced the foot of an elephant, thus relieving him of great pain. Sixteen years passed and the man and the beast did not meet again. One day the elephant was parading in a certain city, when he stopped all of a sudden and going up to the sidewalk put out his trunk to salute the surgeon who had lanced his foot sixteen years before.
In Siam he is used in the lumber-yards and is a great lumber-piler.
The elephant has always furnished much sport for the princes in India, where he is used to hunt tigers. The men ride on the great beast's back and shoot the tiger from this vantage-ground.
A domesticated elephant is also often used in capturing wild elephants.
But all these stirring pictures of the elephant in tiger hunts, taking part in elephant-drives, and piling lumber are scenes of the Orient and far removed from our United States. Here we know the elephant as a show animal and the pride of the circus. True, he can when occasion requires put on a harness and draw a circus-wagon out of the mud when six horses have failed to start it, but he is usually seen marching along in the parade with stately tread, or quietly eating hay in the animal tent. If he is very clever, he will come into the circus ring and do tricks that are fairly marvelous. But in these he does not use as much reason as we often think. They are more the result of months of patient training on the part of the trainer and a fine memory on the part of the pachyderm.
So I think it is as the circus favorite that we shall still have to know the elephant, the great feature in the parade, and the giant of all the circus wonders.
In this book, however, the author will take the reader to the jungle and the plain where the elephant lives and where he is captured, and show how he is brought from the wild, and tamed and taught tricks, until he becomes the very central figure in the American Circus.