SKIRMISHER

“It was 1916, and things were changing fast. World War I raged in Europe. Dadaism, ripe with comic derision and irrationality, took hold in artistic circles. Freeform jazz took hold of the American music scene. Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic. It was a good year for scapegoats. It was a good year to hang an elephant….”

So begins the fascinating, heartwrenching tale about how people decided to execute an elephant for “murdering” her handler. Which is somehow not very different from this recent spate of Crocodile Hunter-related attacks against stingrays.

But I know you’re still hungry for some more block-quotes, so here they are:

Mary didn’t perform for the matinee performance the day she died. She was chained outside the circus tent, and folks say she spent the entire performance time swaying nervously. The crowd’s dissatisfaction with her absence was mollified by the announcement that Mary would be hung in the Clinchfield Railyards later in the afternoon — with no additional charge for admission.

More than 2,500 people gathered to watch Mary swing near the turn-table and powerhouse on that drizzly afternoon; perhaps the number of eyewitnesses, as well as the unforgettable, sad spectacle of the event, explains the consensus on this part of the story.

One of those witnesses, Myrtle Taylor, remembered that every child in Erwin was at the Clinchfield Yards. “And they took the other elephants and Mary down Love Street from the performance to the railyards, trunk to tail. We kids hung back because we were scared to death, but still we wanted to see it.”

Wade Ambrose, who was 20 at the time Mary was hung, recalls that the roustabouts chained Mary’s leg to the rail, then drove her companions back around the roundhouse.

“They had a time getting the chain around her neck. Then they hooked the boom to the neck chain, and when they began to lift her up, I heard the bones and ligaments cracking in her foot. They finally discovered that she’d not been released from the rail, so they did that.”

It doesn’t seem surprising that the chain from which Mary hung snapped shortly after she was raised off the ground. It was, after all, just a 7/8″ chain, and Mary weighed 10,000 pounds. She hit the ground and sat upright, immobilized from the pain of a broken hip.

“It made a right smart little racket when the elephant hit the ground,” says eyewitness George Ingram, with admirable understatement.

Seeing Mary loose, not knowing that she had broken her hip and couldn’t move, the crowd panicked and ran for cover. Then one of the roustabouts “ran up her back like he was climbing a small hill and attached a heavier chain”; the winch was put in motion a second time, and Mary died.

They left her hanging for a half-hour, witnesses say, and then they dumped her in the grave they’d dug with a steam shovel 400 feet up the tracks. (The reports of the grave size vary from a too-small 10 by 12 feet to “big as a barn.”)

LINK via NEATORAMA

Stumble it!