America's First Elephant at Harvard Graduation Exercises in 18th Century Tour of the Continent

The first elephant ever brought to the United States came to the Harvard Commencement exercises in 1796, being exhibited at several cities en route and afterwards to curious audiences all over the country.

The pachyderm arrived as the result of a little speculative adventure on the part of Captain Jacob Crowninshield, of the Salem family of Crowninshields, who bought it at a bargain sale in Bengal for $450, only to sell it the minute it walked off the pier in New York for $10,000.

"In size he surpasses all other terrestrial creatures, and by his intelligence, he makes as near an Approach to Man, as Matter can approach Spirit," said the blurbs on the 1797 advertising posters. And, indeed, he did approach spirit expertly in drinking thirty bottles of porter a day.

The bottles of porter, which is a dark, heavy liquor made with browned malt, he uncorked with his trunk.

These elephantine tales come from Mr. Robert W. G. Vail, librarian of the American Antiquarian Society--formerly headed by President Calvin Coolidge. America's circus history, Mr. Vail says, began in 1720 with the arrival in Boston of a "lyon." Devotees of the "big top" first suffered a setback when "Old Bet," the second elephant to reach this country, was shot by a Maine farmer because the manager's receipts from admissions were drawing money out of the Pine Tree State. But "Little Bet," soon to follow, had a hide "so thick no bullet could pierce it." Some young pranksters in Chepachet, Rhode Island, pumped her in the eye with a BB gun, costing their fathers $1500.

The climax to early local circus history came in 1843, when a promoter brought 15 buffaloes, "captured in the Rocky Mountains," to Worcester and parked them back of a hotel. Their escape concentrated the attention of Worcester residents on a relentless buffalo hunt for three days before normal activity could be resumed.