Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Bostock Animals #2


bostock ele2 - Copy, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Posted by Buckles at 8/29/2007 05:55:00 AM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Richard Reynolds says - -

This may be the male Jumbo II alleged to have sired twin calves.

Fellow Circus Historical and Bartlett Societies member, Wilbur Schmidt of Chicago, an assiduous researcher, furnished the following item.

From the New York Times for 25 June 1903 - - - -

“TWIN ELEPHANTS BORN”

“Twin elephants were born yesterday [June 24, 1903] to Big Liz, the only female elephant in Bostock’s collection at Sea Beach Palace, Coney Island. One of the twins lived only a short time, but the other will probably survive.
The twins were born between 4 and 4:30 P.M. in the stall which Big Liz regularly occupies. A wall of canvas was at once erected about them. The babies were directly named Shamrock III and Reliance. It was Reliance that died.
The father of the babies is Jumbo II, whom Liz met at the Pan-American Exposition twenty-two months ago. It is said that Jumbo II is at the present time dying of blood poisoning in Cleveland, Ohio.”

Further RJR Comments:

 These are previously unknown (at least to me) elephant births in USA.

 One must be cautious about accepting such turn-of-century elephant birth announcements at face value because there were many of them around that time which were pure fabrications. Nevertheless, there are some factors pointing toward possibly authenticity for this event, to wit:

(1) The item appeared in the New York Times, which under the ownership of Adolph Ochs (1898 et. seq.), was (is) usually judicious and scrupulous in its reporting of factual occurances;

(2) Twinning in elephants is not all that rare [Haufellner et.al.(1993) reported twin Asians born in Tierpark Hellabrunn, Munich, Germany in 1951, July 28 and August 10 - - the calves coming 13 days apart. Another set of Asian twins was born at Port Lympe Zoo, England in 1990, 24 June and 2 July, the two calves coming almost a month apart - -all of these twin calves were stillborn];

(3) Bostock did indeed have his elephant Big Liz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. She is figured on p.30 of Frank C. Bostock’s Zoological Congress and Trained Wild Animal Arena -Illustrated Catalogue and Book of Natural History. There, she is depicted as a male Asian tusker - - that probably signifies nothing more than artistic license on the part of the illustrator;

(4) In the Bostock program for the Exposition was an elephant trainer named Mr. Matthew Johnson. In Bostock’s 1903 book is a photo of a fine Asian male tusker with his trainer “M. Johnson.” The elephant is not named but may well have been the sire mentioned in the above Times article;

(5) The dates for the Pan-American Exposition were May 1-Nov. 1, 1901. The twin elephants were said to have come from a meeting between Big Liz and Jumbo II “22-months ago,” or September 1901. And the Bostock animals were in Buffalo at that very time. Moreover 22 months is about right for elephant gestation; and

(6) Jumbo II was said to be sick in Cleveland at the time of the births, and sure enough, there was a Bostock unit that played Manhattan Beach in Cleveland that summer.

 Further research is necessary to determine what happened to mother and the surviving calf Shamrock III. That nothing previously has been written about it (at least as far as I know) might suggest that it too did not survive. That seems to be the fate of many elephant twins.

 The supposed sire, Jumbo II, is unknown to me, unless he is one and same as an Asian male of that name with the Hargreaves Circus in 1903 where his moniker was soon changed to Columbus. From Marcks and Woodcock we have him with that show in 1903-07. For 1908-09 he was at the William P. Hall Farm in Lancaster, MO and in 1910 he was with the Tiger Bill Wild West show. He was executed on June 8, 1910 at the Hall Farm. For this to be the sire of the twin calves, he quite obviously would have recovered from the condition of extremis described by the Times. I know nothing about the dam, Big Liz, before or after the supposed births.

 Frank C. Bostock (1866-1912) was the grandson of pioneer British menagerist George Wombwell. He came to America with his wild animal acts in 1894. With him as business associates and animal trainers came the Italian-Britishers Francis and Joseph Ferari. They made a big hit with the American public. They based their shows at the famed American amusement complex at Coney Island, NY. They got into the carnival business and for a while operated a series of so-called “zoos” which were set in winter months in places like Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. Animal acts were a staple. According to Chris Audibert, in 1898 Bostock obtained the right to use the Hagenbeck name on his shows. One of the attractions of his 1899 carnival was “Bostock’s Hagenbeck’s Trained Wild Animal Show.”

 After Bostock’s death in 1912, his American properties were sold. Audibert wrote:

“ … the animals were sold by 1914. In the U.S. the performing animals were purchased by D. Horsley for Centaur Films of Bayonne, NJ. Later this outfit moved to Los Angeles, CA and became the Selig Zoo . . [Conover wrote that it was established in Los Angeles in 1912] . . . with Jack Bonavita [John F. Genter] as head trainer. Jack was killed by a polar bear at the Selig Zoo in 1917. Most of the non-performing animals were sold to the Borough of Brooklyn and formed the nucleus of the Prospect Park zoo.” [Chris Audibert, “The Frank C. Bostock Mighty Midway Carnival Co.,” Midway Journal Illustrated, Feb. 1999]

Kisling fixes the date of the founding of Prospect Park zoo as 1893 which is not to say that the Bostock animals did not go there as per Audibert.


22 February 2002

Richard J. Reynolds, III
1186 Warrenhall Lane, NE
Atlanta, GA 30319

Tel: (404) 252-5449

E-Mail: RJR3RD@aol.com

29 August, 2007 12:55
Anonymous said...

Wow, all great info. On the subject of twin births, it has happened in the U.S. a few more times. At Portland in Aug. '94, Hugo sired twins out of Me Tu, one still and the other, Rose Tu is still living. At Ft. Worth in June '96, Bucky Steele's Buke or the zoos Groucho sired twins out Babe, both stillborn.

29 August, 2007 14:50

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