An Elephant's Tale

Jumbo is undoubtedly the best-known Elephant that ever lived. The giant elephant's name has spawned the common word "jumbo" as meaning large in size. In 1861 he was captured as a baby in Ethiopia. At that time he was only 3 1/2 feet tall.

Jumbo was shipped to Paris where he remained in the Zoological Gardens for three years. He was then transferred to the London Zoological Gardens, and was used for a riding animal, countless numbers of children riding on his back. He became very popular with the boys and girls of England. He was in London seventeen years, growing all the time, until he was so big that P.T. Barnum, American circus man, became interested. He paid $10,000 for the great creature, and brought him to the United States in 1882. As you can imagine, the children of England were filled with sorrow when their friend sailed away. When Barnum had offered to buy Jumbo, 100,000 school children wrote to Queen Victoria begging her not to sell him.

Barnum had paid $10,000 for Jumbo the elephant. He spent another $20,000 for the logistical nightmare of getting his new pet to America. If anyone doubted the showman's brilliance, it was only for a moment: In his first ten days with the circus menagerie, Jumbo brought in $30,000; during the first year, he earned $1.5 million.

In the United States and Canada, Jumbo was placed on exhibition, and he became very famous.The defining moment of Jumbo the elephant's life was his untimely death at the age of 24. On September 15, 1885, as the traveling circus was loading the menagerie onto trains in St. Thomas, Ontario, the tragedy occurred. A portion of the fence that ran along the railyard tracks had been removed, allowing the parading animals to descend a small hill and board the cars. Jumbo and the baby clown elephant, Tom Thumb, were ambling toward their "Palace Car" when an unscheduled express freight train roared toward the entourage. Seeing that Jumbo and Tom Thumb were in danger, Scotty , trainer, scrambled down the adjacent embankment and shouted a warning.

St. Thomas is where Jumbo died. So they put a big statue up to him there. It's big. The statue is in a small roadside park in the town. It's open all the time. There's a big plaque that talks about Jumbo. St. Thomas is just south of London Ontario.

In Barnum's vivid rendering of the tale--told numerous times with equally numerous embellishments--Jumbo sacrificed his own life to save the baby elephant. Jumbo swung around, wrapped his long trunk around Tom Thumb, and hurled him 20 yards away, with a force that cost the calf a broken hind leg, but saved his life. With no hope of his own salvation, Jumbo took the locomotive head on, trumpeting the ensuing onslaught.

Jumbo's skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The elephant's heart was sold to Cornell University. Jumbo's hide was stuffed and traveled with Barnum's circus for a number of years. In 1889, Barnum donated the stuffed Jumbo to Tufts University, where it was displayed until destroyed by a fire in 1975. Jumbo's tail, which survived the fire, is kept in the University archives. The great elephant's ashes are kept in a 14-ounce Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar in the office of the Tufts athletic director. A statue of "Jumbo" was purchased from an amusement park and placed on the Tufts campus after the fire, however this statue erroneously depicts an Asian elephant, not an African elephant. In honour of Barnum's donation of the elephant's hide and more than $50,000, Jumbo became the university's mascot, and remains such to this day.