Nigel Rothfels

Hi Richard, I was having a conversation about Akeley's "Fighting Bulls" -- the two elephants in the main hall of the Field Museum. The question I got was: would Chicagoan's have had the opportunity of seeing elephants in Chicago during those years? The work was first shown in 1909. My response was that I wasn't sure whether Lincoln Park had elephants at that point, but that I assumed they did, and that certainly elephants were coming through Chicago with circuses fairly regularly at that point. In short, people would have very likely seen a living elephant. I wondered, though: that there are elephants and there are elephants, and I think these two African bulls would have made a rather different impression than what people had already seen. Which brings me to my question to you: how many African elephants do you think were running around the US/Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century; and how many bulls? Do you have any idea? I think one could use the Chang Reynolds elephant biographies at CWM to do answer most of this; something that always makes me want to digitize that info and organize it so that I could have it all on a spreadsheet! Thoughts, Nigel