Today is the anniversary of the birth of America’s greatest showman – P.T. Barnum. Here is the story of the greatest attraction in his circus.
On Feb. 3, 1882, the most famous elephant in the world was sold to American showman P.T. Barnum. Two-year-old Jumbo was captured in the Sudan in 1862 after hunters killed his mother. He ended up in a Paris zoo and then was traded to the London Zoo in 1865. He quickly became the leading attraction. He would give rides to children, including Queen Victoria’s kids. Jumbo was over 11 feet tall and weighed 13,000 pounds. He consumed 200 pounds of hay, a barrel of potatoes, 2 bushels of oats, 15 loaves of bread, a bunch of onions, and several pails of water per day. When the Zoo decided to sell him, supposedly because he was developing a dangerous ill-temper, all of England was upset. 100,000 schoolkids wrote letters to the Queen begging her to stop the sale. But the sale went through with Barnum paying $10,000 (over $225,000 today) for him. In the first three weeks of exhibition at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Barnum recouped his investment. The exhibition lasted 31 weeks. After that Jumbo toured with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, helping make it the “Greatest Show on Earth”. Before the circus left NYC, Jumbo led the 21 other elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge in a publicity stunt, but also to prove the safety of the new bridge (21 people had died in a stampede earlier when rumors spread the bridge was collapsing). Sadly, Jumbo only toured for three years. On Sept. 15, 1885, at age 26, he was being loaded onto a train at a town in Canada. He was guiding a young elephant named Tom Thumb across the tracks when a train hit them. Jumbo was killed. Or so Barnum described it. In another version, Jumbo was being taken for a walk when he tripped on the tracks and impaled himself with his tusk, then the train hit him. Barnum, ever the entrepreneur, had him stuffed and he continued to tour, leading the parade into town on a cart. The stuffed elephant ended up on display at Tufts University (he is their mascot), but was destroyed in a fire. The skeleton is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. He lives on today in our word for large size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo
https://allthatsinteresting.com/jumbo-the-elephant
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