America’s First Elephant

For World Elephant Day, we have one more to add to our post on the Elephants of Travalanche, with its links to a dozen relevant articles. For Old Bet, whom we wrote about just two weeks ago, was but the second known elephant to reach American shores (that is, since the mammoths died out). The first is known as the Crowninshield Elephant, after Captain Jacob Crowninshield, a Salem-based operator in the China Trade.

Crowninshield had purchased the creature in Bengal and brought it back to New York City in April, 1896, betting on a certain sale due to its exoticism. A man named Owen purchased her for $10,000 and exhibited her up and down the Eastern seaboard for a ticket price of 25-50 cents (rather high for those days, but possible because no one in America had ever seen an elephant before). This elephant was also a performer — she could do a trick of uncorking a bottle of beer and quaffing it, said to have been taught to her by sailors on the trip over. Some writers have mixed this elephant up with Old Bet, who didn’t arrive until 1804. The two concerns were in competition for years until 1816, the year Old Bet was slain. The last recorded exhibition of the Crowninshield Elephant was in 1818. No one knows her fate after that.