We tend to think of history as something that occurs between peoples, but in fact, one of the
greatest struggles in human history is a struggle between humans and their environment. From the
beginning of human civilization we have sought to tame, to exploit, to defend ourselves from
nature and its creatures. Something that has only become more difficult as our civilization expands
further into those creatures' habitats. In many ways the struggle with nature defines humanity,
we have built so many of our myths, our legends, our beliefs around the struggle between humanity
and the unknown powerful forces of nature. And so if we study some of the most famous historical
struggles between people and the creatures of our environment we learn something about ourselves,
our past, and maybe even get some guidance for our future, as we continue to try to learn how
to live in harmony with our environment. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
While its name may not be familiar to you the Champawat tigress was one of the most prolific
of the so-called man-eaters in recorded history. She started killing in Nepal,
sometime around 1903. As villagers started disappearing, hunters were dispatched but found
the animal difficult to track. In fact, man-eaters can be particularly clever. The tiger, or rather
as it was later determined tigress, could be quite bold, attacking from ambush to pull a person from
a crowd. And it seemed to know to avoid people who were armed. As she continued to evade hunters
and the death toll rose, the government eventually dispatched soldiers of the Nepalese army who still
failed to catch the animal, but whose widespread actions seem to have driven her across over into
India. By then she killed more than 200 people in Nepal. Bengal tigers are among the largest of
the world's great cats. Males can weigh over 700 pounds, or 325 kilograms. They attack from ambush,
typically from the side or behind, and are capable of bringing down an adult Indian rhinoceros.
Conflicts between humans and tigers are not uncommon. It is estimated the tigers have killed
as many as a million people over the last five centuries. However tigers do not prefer humans as
prey, and man-eating tigers are rare. After being driven into India, the tigress settled into the
remote Champaran district where she became even more dangerous and territorial. She had learned
hunters behavior and continued to evade them. She became bold enough to attack villages in
the middle of the day. Villagers refused to go out and boarded up their windows convinced that rather
than a tiger, they were being hunted by demons. In 1906 an administrator invited a noted game hunter
named Jim Corbett to hunt the Champawat tigress. Corbett was an officer in the British Indian Army
who had been raised in India and was a famously skilled hunter, and crack-shot. After setting
the condition that all bounties be removed, and that all other hunters and soldiers be removed
from the hunt, he hunted down and killed the tigress in 1907. Her fatal mistake was boldly
killing a 16 year old girl, her last victim, and thus leaving a trail that Corbett was able
to follow. After finding the general location where the tiger had been hiding, he organized
300 villagers to do a Beat the next day, walking in line to the forest making noise, driving the
tigress out where Corbett could kill her. Upon examination the tigress was found to have lost
the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of her mouth, apparently from a hunter's bullet.
The damage made it difficult for her to catch regular prey and that was likely both what had
driven her to become a man-eater, and what taught her to avoid men with guns. The sixteen-year-old
girl had been the Champawat tigress's four hundred and thirty sixth confirmed human victim.
On June 9th 1918, a woman in the small village of Benji in the route of Prag district of India
woke up, aware of some sort of dangerous presence in her home. She caught a brief glimpse of what
appeared to be a powerful creature backing out of the hut. When her husband lit a lamp
they found that their seven-year-old son was gone. He had become the first victim of the
terrifying creature that would become known as the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag.
The creature terrified the surrounding countryside for eight years. The best hunters would try to
track it, always to lose its trail. People became terrified to travel between the forty or so
kilometers between the Hindu temples of Kedarnath and Badrinath, high in the Himalaya Mountains.
Villagers refused to go out at night, only to have the creature tear down doors, or tear through mud,
or thatch walls to grab victims from their homes, to be devoured. The leopard can be a deadly
foe. A largely nocturnal hunter, it is stronger proportionately than the larger lion or tiger, and
hunters describe it as more cunning than either. They can run more than 60 kilometers per hour and
have greater agility, stealthiness, ability to climb, and better developed sense of smell than
a tiger. And being smaller, they can conceal themselves more easily in more meager cover.
Once a leopard kills and eats a human they are likely to persist as man-eaters. The leopard of
Rudraprayag in fact once stepped into a pen full of nearly 40 goats, and ignored the goats in order
to go kill and devour the 16 year old goat herder who was sleeping in the center of the pen. While
man-eating leopards are rare and represent a very small portion of leopards, they are
persistent pests to humans even today. A period of rapid urbanization at the end of the 19th and
turn of the 20th century resulted in particular conflict between people and leopards in India,
where nearly 12,000 deaths were officially attributed to leopards between 1875 and 1912.
Eventually the leopard of Rudraprayag garnered enough attention that the government responded,
first by offering bounties, and then by sending hunters, and finally by detaching
a battalion of soldiers. But the leopard of Rudraprayag proved to be exceptionally clever,
evading and escaping traps, and proving impossible to track. The people became convinced that the
leopard was in fact a demon, and started to fear reporting him to the hunters for fear
of raising his ire. In at least one reported case a sadhus, an Indian holy man, was burned
alive in his hut by people convinced that he was transforming into the beast at night. In 1925, the
government again sought the help of Jim Corbett. Corbett unsuccessfully hunted the leopard which
showed an almost mystical ability to understand and foil traps for nearly a year and a half,
noting that the leopard was apparently even more clever than man-eating tigers. Finally in May of
1926, Corbett killed the animal only because of a lucky shot made in the dead of night. By that time
the leopard of Rudraprayag had killed, by official records, a hundred and twenty-six people. Although
Corbett assumed the toll was likely much higher as attacks were not always reported. While the
exceptionally large male leopard was aged and showed wounds from several attempts to kill it,
it would have been relatively young when it started killing humans eight years before.
While man-eating big cats are often injured, or diseased, or somehow unable to hunt their normal
prey, Corbett theorized a different explanation for the leopard of Rudraprayag. He theorized
that the bodies of the victims of the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918 had not been disposed
of properly. The leopard had started eating the corpses, and having identified humans as a source
of food, once the disease subsided, turned to hunting them. Although man-eaters often
had injuries that prevented them from hunting normal prey, a study in 1967 determined that
nearly 80% of man-eating leopards were, like the leopard of Rudraprayag, uninjured adult males.
The man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag offers a lesson about how some history can be forgotten.
If one wild animal had killed more than a hundred people in the United States or Europe
at the turn of the 20th century, it would not have taken eight years to hunt the animal down,
and its name would have been known throughout the world. But the man-eating leopard of
Rudraprayag would probably still be unknown today outside the region where it killed those
people if Jim Corbett had not written a book chronicling his hunt that was published in 1947.
And that fact is further supported by the forgotten history of the leopard of Panar,
which Corbett had successfully hunted and killed in 1910. The Panar leopard had in a shorter period
of time killed over 400 people, but was less well known than the leopard of Rudraprayag because,
Corbett argued, “Its hunting grounds in the Almora district were even more remote than Rudraprayag.”
A similar case can be made regarding the so-called Tsavo man-eaters. These two maneless male southern
lions terrorized a construction camp that was building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River
in Kenya as part of the Kenya Uganda Railway in 1898. Ironically, the name Tsavo means “place
of slaughter”, a reference to wars involving the Maasai people. The Lions so aggressively ate the
Indian railway workers, who tried unsuccessfully to hold them off by using campfires and fences
made of thorn bushes, that workers fled the site and stopped construction. Finally after
many unsuccessful attempts, the engineer in charge of the project, an Army officer named John Henry
Patterson, was able to successfully kill both lions. The second reportedly had to be shot nine
times before it died. While there were estimates that the Tsavo lions killed as many as a hundred
and forty people, more recent estimates based on Patterson's journals and an analysis of the
lion's teeth suggests that the number was likely not more than 35. It isn't clear why the lion’s
became man-eaters, but one possibility is that the lions had become accustomed to finding human
bodies along the river which was along the path of the Arab slave trade to the trading center of
Zanzibar. Analysis of their skulls and teeth suggests that abnormalities in the teeth and
jaw might have also made it more difficult for one of the lions to catch and eat normal prey,
prompting him to supplement his diet with railroad workers. That lion then likely taught the other
one. Lions are generalist hyper carnivores, which means that they can survive and adapt to a variety
of conditions and prey, but their diet is more than 70% meat. Chemical tests on the hair and
bone collagen of the Tsavo lions suggest their diet was about half made up of humans. The most
social of the large cats, lions are effective cooperative hunters, but also may hunt on their
own where they are effective ambush hunters. While leopards might be stronger pound for pound,
lions are some two and a half times larger than leopards on average. The lion's attack is short
and powerful, and they regularly kill animals as large as 550 kilograms, or more than 1,200 pounds.
Much like the leopard of Rudraprayag, the story of the Tsavo lions would likely be forgotten history
today if Patterson hadn't written a book about his hunt in 1907. That book has then made it into
popular culture, notably in the 1996 film, The Ghost and the Darkness, starring Val Kilmer and
Michael Douglas. Patterson later sold the skins and skulls of the Tsavo man-eaters to the Chicago
Field Museum where they are on display today. But like the leopard of Rudraprayag, the Tsavo
lions are relatively well known next to the much more prolific man-eaters of Njombe. A virulent
epizootic of a virus called Rinderpest hit Africa near the end of the 19th century, and continued to
plague Africa through the first half of the 20th century. Rinderpest, German for cattle plague, is
similar to canine distemper and affects even-toed ungulates such as cattle, domestic buffalo,
and animals such as antelopes, giraffes, and wildebeests. The human measles virus is thought
to have emerged from the Rinderpest virus. It can be devastating to animal populations. The
1890 Rinderpest Epizootic killed an estimated 90% of the cattle in Sub-Saharan Africa
In response to an outbreak along the border of Malawi and Zambia authorities try to keep the
Rinderpest virus from spreading to domestic herds by calling the population of game animals. That
in turn, caused a shortage of food for the local pride of lions. One pride in an area of southern
Tanzania found another food source. Between 1932 and 1947, the pride of 15 lions started
hunting the local people. Their behavior actually changed, for example, they made their attacks in
the afternoon uncommon for lions. At night they would travel as far as 30 kilometers to attack an
unsuspecting village the next day. The men hunting them even claimed that they seemed to have set up
a sort of relay network that allowed them to drag their prey deeper into the bush to be devoured.
Over the 15 year period the pride, likely at least three generations of lions, were estimated to have
eaten between 1,500 and 2,000 people. Man-eating lions can be difficult to track in Africa, partly
because of local superstition. Where the belief is often that man-eaters are not real lions but
evil spirits, and the people are therefore afraid to report attacks. The Man-Eaters of Njombe were
thought to be directed by a witch doctor who had been removed from power by a chief. Even today,
local superstitions make it difficult for wildlife experts to manage man-eaters. The pride of lions
was eventually hunted and eradicated by a British game warden named George Rushby,
who commented that, “The renowned Man-Eaters of Tsavo were very small fry compared to what
these proved to be.” But, as was the case with the Panar leopard, the victims of the lions
of Njombe were natives in a remote part of the world, so their history is far less well known.
There have been many other man-eating big cats with names like, The Man-Eater of Sagar,
or the Leopard of the Yellagiri Hills, and conflicts still exist today. A maneater in the
Pithoragarh district of India killed at least a dozen people in 2014 and was reportedly targeting
inebriated men who were stumbling home from a night's drinking. The Hindustan Times reported on
a village that was being terrorized by a man-eater in 2017. And New Delhi television reported on the
killing of a female leopard thought to be a man-eater just this last July. On the whole of
course humans have proven more dangerous to big cats than the reverse, and numbers in the wild
have steadily declined. Jim Corbett was, in fact, a great advocate of protecting habitats in order
to preserve populations and reduce conflict with humans. The oldest National Park in
India is named Jim Corbett National Park and was established in part to protect the Bengal tiger.
And while their numbers have dwindled, further encroachment into their habitats means that
conflicts are starting to become more common. And while management techniques have improved,
a problem of conflict between humans and big cats has proven difficult to solve,
and has become more complex as there's more and more need to protect the endangered animal
populations as well as human lives. As we strive to meet those challenges
it is more important than ever that we remember our history with these animals.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the History Guy, short snippets of forgotten history between
10 and 15 minutes long, and if you did enjoy it please go ahead and click that thumbs up
button. If you have any questions, or comments, or suggestions for future episodes please write
those in the comment section, I will be happy to personally respond. Be sure to follow the
History Guy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and check out our merchandise on teespring.com. And
if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history, all you need to do is subscribe.