We at Tufts have a fascinating, real animal as our mascot
who lived on this earth during a fascinating moment in history and was connected to
big events, big people- and
the stuff of history itself.
It starts with P.T. Barnum becoming a trustee at Tufts, he was a founding trustee of the university.
P.T. Barnum was without question the most famous entertainment impresario of
the nineteenth century
and the biggest circus man that ever was.
Barnum had decide do to create a museum of natural history on the Tufts campus.
Animals from Barnum's circus were the stock, so to speak, of the natural history museum.
He had in mind to give Jumbo to Tufts when that horrible day arrived, that Jumbo was no longer with the circus.
Jumbo's life began with what must have been a traumatic separation from his mother on
the savannahs of Africa. He was a wild elephant caught in an area which is now on
the border between Eritrea and Sudan. And he was sold by a Hamran nomadic people to
an animal trader from Europe, from Germany. And he slowly made his way with other exotic
animals from Africa through the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean into Germany.
Briefly at the Paris Zoo but that didn't last long and his fame and popularity really began
in London where he remained for about seventeen years. When he arrived in London from Paris
he wasn't in great health. It's clear that he was slowly nursed back into good health
by his keepers at the London Zoo, in particular a man by the name of Matthew Scott who became
his inseparable friend for the rest of Jumbo's life. There was nothing to suggest first
that he would become the animal that he became. But within about five years of arriving
at the zoo we start to see illustrations of Jumbo giving rides to children. Not all
elephants would allow that, but Jumbo did. And it's really from that moment onwards
I think that the public really starts to take to Jumbo. Tens of thousands of children
rode on his back including some famous people, including Queen Victoria's children, the young
Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt. And Jumbo was anthropomorphized in different ways.
He supposedly fell in love with and married a female elephant at the zoo named Alice,
after "Alice in Wonderland." He was still far from being full-grown when this began
but he grew and as he grew he became more fascinating to the public
and remained as gentle as ever.
Zoo records show however, that after he passed the age of twenty he entered into the elephant
equivalent of puberty during which time male elephants become rather difficult to control.
And the zoo rightly worried that Jumbo might go berserk during public hours
and they simply didn't know what to do with him. Barnum, who was always on the lookout for new acts,
got wind of the problems that the zoo was having with Jumbo and elephants were crucial
to the circus, owing to people's fascination with them. But Jumbo stood out from the
other elephants by virtue of his size and celebrity. He knew that Jumbo would draw
crowds unlike any other single creature. Barnum and his partner Bailey felt that they could
manage Jumbo and so made the zoo an offer they couldn't refuse and the deal was quickly
settled and Jumbo was handed over to Barnum.
It was only when Jumbo refused to leave
the zoo that the public first started to take notice.
It took several weeks of patient
coaxing to get Jumbo to enter the enormous traveling case that had been constructed.
It garnered immense sympathy for the animal. Ten to fifteen thousand people went to
the zoo every day to pay their respects, to take him food, to protest the sale. It
was an extraordinary public outcry. Queen Victoria and other public officials made clear
their disappointment, all of it failed and Barnum eventually won and off Jumbo went to America.
Because we don't know much about what Jumbo's journey was like, a space was created to inject
fantasy and imagination one might say. So we do have these fanciful accounts of Jumbo
dancing the hornpipe with sailors onboard. It was said that one way of calming Jumbo
coming across the Atlantic and to encourage him to get on the boat in the first place
was to give him whiskey.
P.T. Barnum understood what captivated the human imagination
better than anyone of his time or arguably since
and he understood that we are fascinated by
things unusually large and unusually small.
He began life exhibiting performers of different sorts and taking them on the road, including
Tom Thumb who was an undersized human being, probably the most famous stage act of the
nineteenth century. He was a great performer, a great mimic, a great stage presence.
But size was an important feature of Tom Thumb's celebrity. And so Jumbo appealed to him
as the biggest animal and it was certainly appropriate for him to seek Jumbo out as the
sort of face of what Barnum himself called "The Greatest Show on Earth."
Barnum, being a marketing genius, made sure that Jumbo's arrival in this country was accompanied
by hoopla unlike any other event in recent memory.
Some ten thousand people lined
the route from Battery Park in New York City where Jumbo arrived to Madison Square Gardens,
which was the home of the circus at the time. It was the largest crowd reported in New
York City to date. Attendance for the circus that year broke all previous records.
He led the troop of performers around the circus ring to open the circus in effect, but he
But did very little aside from show himself to the crowds. Jumbo was simply there to be
seen and to be admired and gawked at.
1880's coincided with the explosion of consumer products and consumer advertising and Jumbo
was used from the outset, from the moment he arrived in this country, to advertise an
extraordinary range of products and services. And so it built upon itself and rippled
across the twentieth century. The word Jumbo hadn't been known or used before in
the English language before he came along and it has since become the byword for anything
humongous or supersized. So every time we use the word jumbo jet or Jumbotron we
are actually referring back to Jumbo the elephant. And Jumbo was a celebrity and in that sense
he would be quite familiar to us today in our celebrity-hungry culture.
Compared to other circus elephants at the time, Jumbo led a charmed life, he was treated
specially. He seemingly maintained his health, he was gentle, well-behaved.
Whether that means he was happy as an animal, who knows?
He logged about 32,000 miles on the railway with Barnum's circus, in and out of circus cars performing.
So it was a pretty tough, arduous existence. It would be fair to say that he endured his life.
Jumbo died in a tragic train accident in September of 1885 in a small town by the name
of St. Thomas in Ontario. The animals were being lead down the train track after performing
and all of a sudden, unexpectedly a train came around the bend, a freight train that
had been unanticipated, unexpected, unscheduled. And the animals were quickly moved off
the train track, but the problem for Jumbo was that he was unusually large and so difficult
to move. He was struck from behind and died soon thereafter.
There was immediate panic among the circus partners but Barnum had lived through umpteen catastrophes
across his career, nothing fazed him.
Barnum fashioned a story that he charged the oncoming train
and sacrificed his to save that of a baby elephant in the circus. And in fact he'd
already arranged with a noted taxidermist, a man by the name of Henry Ward of Rochester,
to drop whatever he was doing and rush to wherever it was that Jumbo died and to begin
work preparing Jumbo as a stationary, fixed, stuffed animal.
It seems that it was decided
on the spot to also save his bones and articulate the skeleton, double Jumbo,
two Jumbos for the price of one. He knew that Jumbo could have an afterlife at the circus and as long
as Jumbo was making good money on the road with the circus he delayed following through
on the promise to give Jumbo to Tufts. And indeed Jumbo proved as popular dead as he
was alive. But gradually over time it seems that the public did tire of seeing Jumbo.
Barnum eventually decided that the time was right to give the skeleton to the Smithsonian
and the stuffed Jumbo to Tufts. Jumbo was wrapped up and sent by train to North Summerville
station. He was then drawn by horse and wagon, the horse and cart were unable to pull
Jumbo up the hill. Some fifty professors, students, and local boys were brought out
to push the wagon up the hill. When the wagon arrived on campus however, it was realized
that the mounted specimen was too large to get through the door. So they had to disassemble
the entrance to get him in. They had to remove the stone stairs, they had to remove
the keystone and part of the arch that surrounded the entrance. Barnum sent a note saying,
"I'm happy that you have Jumbo. I promised him to you, here he is. However, I may
want to borrow him again because we have in mind a big circus extravaganza taking the
circus back to London again and sure enough the whole process had to happen all over again.
Jumbo was reinstalled some months later and that was that.
The museum remained popular through the 1920's. By the 1930's however, its usefulness
as a Natural History Museum had passed. And so a decision was made at the end of the 1930's
to clear all of the animal specimens, except Jumbo. The Barnum Building was turned into
a student lounge with Jumbo as its centerpiece. Photographs show students relaxing, interacting
with each other, studying for exams, in the shadow of the great pachyderm. All those
little ways, all those little rituals and interactions with him make it clear that he
had won the hearts of the students here and he was really theirs as their mascot.
All was normal until one night in April of 1975 when an electrical fire broke out
at night and burned the building to a cinder. Much was lost, student work, professors'
work and research, and unfortunately Jumbo was also lost. The morning after the fire
an employee entered the building to save some of the ashes from the burnt Jumbo and all
that was to hand was an empty peanut butter jar. The other thing that survives is Jumbo's
tail. Jumbo's tail had actually been pulled off by a mischievous student so it was in
the Tufts archives when the building burned. And today that together with the jar
of ashes is what survives of our mascot.
His life intersected with so many important strands
in modern American history- the rise of popular entertainment, mass entertainment, museums,
of celebrity itself, of advertising, but it would be impossible to say really what the
quality of his life was. And I think it illustrates you know the complicated and shifting
relationship that human beings have had with animals over a very long period of time.
So that's quite a span really of identities from wild animals, zoo, circus creature, museum
specimen, college mascot, one animal has had to endure that kind of transition. His
legend, his mythology lasted well into the twentieth century and you know really explained
why we took to the word Jumbo to mean anything that is larger than life, unusually big, and
why it still has currency in our language today.