Philadelphia Zoo Bolivar The elephant at Philadelphia Zoo 1888-1908

Hello!

I'm researching the life of Forepaugh's Bolivar, a huge Asian elephant who was given to the Philly Zoo on Christmas Day 1888. I have old drawings of him during his time at the circus and museum, but only 1 grainy photo of him at the zoo (an image taken of his left side in his enclosure, with his trunk raised and his back leg straining at his chains). Theres no image on him in the online Philly zoo guidebooks from the time and searches on Philly history websites also came up empty.

I'm hoping zoo chat might be able to help me out with the following:

1. A contact name for an archivist or educator at the Philly zoo who might be able to help
2. Any other source (aside from newspapers + guidebooks) which might yield historical photos of Philly Zoo that I might ave missed
3. Any tips or tricks for identifying an individual elephant, what's the best way to tell them apart? What are key identifying features for each individual? This will help me perhaps ascertain which elephant might be Bolivar from group shots of the elephants at the circus and zoo.

I will certainly share my research with anyone who's interested and aim to make a wiki page for him!

Huge thanks to anyone who can help!
B

 

I have certainly heard of Bolivar, so I thought there might be material out there. With just the words "Bolivar" and "elephant," I found quite a few promising leads, including a NY Times article from 1888, a variety of images, an entry in elephants.se, and even an IMDB page showing a 1903 documentary that looks to be hitting a limited number of screens in re-release. There is also this extensive academic article on Bolivar, that in itself is exhaustively informative, but has a bibliography that could lead you back to original documents and pictures.

"Bolivar: "killer" elephant or abused pachyderm? " by Harold E. Lippman
Bolivar: "killer" elephant or abused pachyderm?

Let me peruse some academic sources available only by subscription, including the NYT Archive, and I'll post anything interesting I find.

 

Oh, as to identifying features of elephants:. There are quite a few, but the two that will narrow things down most is whether the elephant in the photo is an African or Asian, and from there, whether it has tusks or not.

If you're new to elephants, go to a general source like Wikipedia to note the key differences in Africans, like larger Africa-shaped ears and a flat top of head instead of the two domes that Asians have. Historically, it was thought that Africans were behaviorally harder to work with, so there were fewer in circuses. Likewise all males experience a hormonal cycle called musth, which can make males of either species very aggressive and prodigiously strong. For this reason, both circuses and zoos overwhelmingly chose Asian females, who have no tusks. So, if you're looking at a picture and the elephant has tusks, check the ears and head, and see if it is Asian. Considering how relatively fewer male Asian elephants were imported, any picture you find of a male Asian elephant especially from the late 19th Century stands a fair chance of being Bolivar. Add to this that he had particular notoriety, and the chance becomes much better. But considering that males are so strong--and they largely live separately both in the wild and in human cars--it might not be very likely that he was photographed in groups. He also had the notoriety of killing someone, so he had a star quality that would have earned him solo shots.

Limiting your research just to the Philadelphia Zoo will limit your chances. Look everywhere.

 

Hi there! Thank you so much for doing this but I should have said I have already extensively searched all the newspapers from 1870-1920 and am aware of all these online resources- I’m very much looking for only the requests in the original post but thank you so much - I hope you didn’t spend too much time on that!

 

This is great, yes, I’m good on Asian/African it’s just if there’s key features for identifying individuals - i was thinking maybe ear shapes or some wrinkle pattern or something perhaps! Bolivar was a tuskless male Asian, he may well have had a scar on his trunk from a Camel bite but apart from that I don’t have a good enough quality photo to really study him. I will certainly take into account your tip of him being photographed alone. I really want to see if the philly zoo has an archive because I have exhausted all other avenues!!! Thank you so much for all you additional information that’s really super helpful!

Warmest wishes!

 

Sorry--you didn't indicate you knew as much as you did! In studying elephants, I have always been surprised by what an incredible resource circus folk are. They pass lore down through generations, and it wouldn't surprise me if you learned more via that route than through the zoo. Contacting the zoo directly will let you know almost immediately what they have. It's so early in the history of US zoos and still early-ish in the routine use of cameras, so I'm not sure they necessarily yet would have seen the need to document their history.

When I return to my laptop this weekend, I'll explore some more restricted sources. Are you interested only in his time in Philly? If so, for what reason? Trying to understand what you hope to accomplish!

 

No worries, i’m overwhelmed with your help and generosity- I should have said I’m coming to the end of the research and just looking for access to any offline resources.

I’ve gone through the circus archive with no confirmed Bolivar photos (and their info is a mix of all the different bolivars around at the time). For those photos that might be of Bolivar- I wanted some tips on what to look for to confirm- eg identifying marks. I’m waiting on someone to get back to me from the Philadelphia academy of science, the philly zoo and the circus archives (it’s been months of repeated emails and requests) and I haven’t got any response from them - even to say a ‘no’ - it’s quite frustrating so I was hoping to find someone here who might have an in road or a name that might help me get a response. Elephants.se is new to me so I will check if there’s a photo on there but my final goal is to find another confirmed photo of Bolivar and be able to see the source so I can request usage rights. Thanks again for all your help! I’m totally blown away by your support!

 

You're very welcome. And for clarification, by circus, I didn't mean formal archives. Look for sites and blogs of carnies, who carried on one generation after another in the profession and have fantastic networks and memories handed down. You're looking for little nuggets, little gems. You know, one of our most respected elephant experts is Charlie Gray of Ontario's African Lion Safari, and despite the name, has spectacularly bred upwards of 20 Asian elephants in the last 25 years. He told me that he had lived in FL where circuses had off-season homes, and he has a very strong knowledge of and connection to circus people going back generations. He even names his elephants after circus people and elephants. Lol. It's hardly what he's best known for today, but he could certainly point you in the right direction.

 

Oh wow! That’s a fantastic tip! Thank you so so much!

 

Hi Bonnie,
I'm SO GLAD I found this post and I'm happy to help! I've been researching Bolivar for a while since late 2014 (BIG fan of his too!) and am trying to make a short documentary on him but am short on material to put into it.

First off for a short biography, Bolivar was originally from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He was imported to the USA where he was in the Van Amburgh Circus then later in Adam Forepaugh's. In 1888 like you said, he was gifted to the Philadelphia Zoo. From material I've read it seems that he was about 9'6" tall when he arrived eventually growing to 10' and because of his musth was chained in his stall for the rest of his life. Back then at the turn of the century there were no hydraulic operated doors and "crush" chutes to control a massive Makhna (tuskless) bull elephant like Bolivar. When he died in 1908 he was skinned and sent to the Academy of Natural Sciences where he was mounted by the Academy's taxidermist David McCadden. The skin mount went on display in 1910 and his skeleton a short time later. Because of the fact that Bolivar's skin was in such bad condition prior to its mounting it continually decayed over time and in 1916 an attempt was made to restore it. Here's an article from the Philadelphia Ledger on the 1916 restoration of the skin mount by McCadden. The skin deteriorated further and was taken off display in 1919 (later destroyed). His skeleton is still at the Academy in their mammal collection.

I saw on your Twitter that you posted photos of his skin being mounted by McCadden. Where did you get them? It looked like screenshots off of Google Books or a digitized newspaper. Do you have them in a higher resolution and could you post them here in this thread? The original negatives must be in the Academy's archives somewhere. It seems that their photo collection hasn't been digitized yet.

Historical photos pertaining to the history of the Philadelphia Zoo can be found at Temple University. Its sad that the historical photos haven't been digitized yet. The Academy of Natural Sciences used to have a small online gallery under their research library's web page with photos on it which included Bolivar but has disappeared. Thankfully, before that I saved the photos.

Video footage of Bolivar also apparently exists. In 1903 two films were made titled "Trick Elephant Bolivar, the Largest Elephant in the World, No. 1" & "Trick Elephant Bolivar, the Largest Elephant in the World, No. 2". I've searched for these online as well multiple times but couldn't find a video file that was posted to view them (don't want to download viruses).

As for photos here's what I've found over the years. I've uploaded them here:

Poster of Bolivar from PBS's "The Circus" documentary:



Another poster from his time in Forepaugh's circus:



Poster promoting him as a boxing elephant:



Photograph of him at the Philadelphia Zoo from Getty Images:




Bolivar on display at Academy of Natural Sciences in 1910 (YouTube screenshot from the Academy's channel):



Another photo from another view:



A rear view of his skeleton from another hall:


My recreations of his skin & skeleton that I made in Photoshop based on the images you saw above:

Bolivar Skin Mount Recreation by Sarus Crane posted 23 May 2019 at 11:29 PM

Bolivar Skeletal Mount Recreation by Sarus Crane posted 23 May 2019 at 11:43 PM

That's it. I don't own the rights to any of these photos. A good person to ask for more information would probably be this guy: he has loads of info on historic circus and zoo elephants along with other circus animals and performers. He has many photos of historical elephants. I hope this helps and hopefully there's more out there on him that can be found!

 

Not back at my laptop yet, but I had two thoughts. I didn't mention any of these carny blogs, because I don't remember any of their names, but I was looking up a certain elephant myself once and stumbled onto the first one, that led to another, and so on. Oral histories have become an important new way of documenting history, but it's not at all new. Ancient civilizations all passed information down through the generations, and nowhere is this still as prevalent as with Native Americans and circus people. I found that families had multiple generations of circus performers and trainers, so there was nothing that someone's grandfather or second cousin etc hadn't heard while working alongside an elephant trainer 60 years ago, etc. There is a wealth of lore passed down in this culture, and with a subject as famous as Bolivar, I'm sure there have been plenty of stories passed down.

This may be minor for your purposes, but tuskless Asians usually come from only one country, Sri Lanka. This could be easily confirmed if you could get access to even an outdated studbook.

 

Bravo, Sarus Crane. REALLY great work. The recreations must have taken you ages. He certainly does look like a Sri Lankan, with the long legs and high hips and the smaller domes. Does anyone know his age when he was brought here? Males were so dangerous that it must have been his lack of tusks that would lead anyone to think he could be managed. Or someone ignored male genitalia and simply assumed he must be a female?

The promo pics are falsely showing full tusks, but the skeleton shots seem to reveal tushes, making the ads seem a bit less dishonest.

I noted the two 1903 films on IMDB when I first responded above, but there are also two different projects with the title "Bolivar" in development, one a piece of animation and the other a TV series, both due this year, but lacking details because they are "in development.". At least one is based on a novel, so it can't be a documentary.

 

Thats Amazing Sarus!

I don't have a lot to add - I pretty have similar information, along with some rather interesting anecdotes, that I've been been pulling out of the papers over the last year. I've seen all those images except that Ghetty photo which is great, although I wish there was one of him front on!! As to his origins, I have Ceylon or East India and that he was either brought to America either by Kelly (Amburghs animal dealer) in 1863 or brought over by the Reiche Brothers in 1873, I've got conflicting research from Bob Cline and Circus history and they don't have the references listed so im unsure of these sources, but like AmbikaFan mentions, there's a wealth of knowledge in circus people! Are you linked with Philadelphia? I really don't have the resources to fly out there sadly (I'm in LA) but that's good to know stuff exists. I can't get anyone from the Academy to reply since they passed me on to their archivist which is so frustrating but I work in museum and also know how overloaded everyone is!

Those images of his taxidermy were from newspaper screen shots so they're the best I can get too! I've also only found one account of him killing a man which details the incident and gives the name of the victim - I don't think the rumors that he killed several people are really true, although I may have missed things - im not sure how to find circus peoples deaths if they die on the road. It seems stories of his rage were to excite the potential circus crowds so there's a lot of 'fluff' surrounding him.

Are you on twitter? maybe I can DM you with my project? I'm collating about 5 pages of information on him currently and then I need to work out how to post on wikipedia (!!) - im sure a lot of it will not be new to you but I'd appreciate your eye over this! You can find all my Bolivar tweets if you search the hashtag #RememberBolivar

I'm so excited you got in touch - you're most welcome to come to the Exhibition when its on ion Late September if you like!

 

Yes, im going to add this to the search, thanks!

 

Agreed - those recreations are marvelous - you certainly did a better job than the taxidermist!! The illustrations were reused for other elephants so the tusked Bolivar drawings may also be of just a generic tall elephant and they didn't bother to take the tusks off for him! Ive got friends in the film industry and even they advent been able to access the IMDB films for me so I'm not sure they're a goer sadly.

Saurus, do you do recreations professionally? maybe I could commission one of Bolivar from the front?

Best wishes
B

 

Bonnie, there's something about your photo that looks more like an illustration. Notice how the background (that looks to be foliage?) ends suddenly at his trunk and then there are wooden doors? Also how shaded the underside of his trunk looks as if curls up? It's too hard a line, as if he were cut-and-pasted in. It also has the emotional tug an illustration would go for, with that yearning to break out of the chains. I'm afraid those wooden doors would be no match for an elephant his size, or whatever wooden post those front chains are booked to. Plus, this looks nothing like the zoo stall in Sarus Crane's photo.

It's a shame, but I almost like the elephant enclosure of 1910 better than the Pachyderm Building that replaced it in the 1940s. Like most of its time, the new building was hard and concrete and provided much too little space for too many animals. It was atrocious even before activists said it was atrocious.

 

Yes, sorry - I should have qualified that its an illustration of a photograph that I didn't have handy at the time but here's the image attached from Sam Hawley's blog on Topsy - sadly it does look a bit traumatic/dramatic so I don't want to use for the exhibition really as its quite provocative and my exhibition is meant to be a bit of a healing experience! I can't find the source of the photo anyway - I wonder if I should just use them and if someone complains I can take them down

 

One last thing, that paper by Lippman seems to have a lot of odd information in it - for one they call him a 'tusker' - obviously Bolivar did not have tusks so they might have conflated Forepaugh's Bolivar with another trick elephant Bolivar who did have tusks (easily done - I have got nearly ten other elephants called Bolivar around at the time which im still trying to settle!). Lippman also states that Bolivar killed a man who offered him a lit cigar - there's a lot of hearsay at the time that elephants hate tobacco and would fly into a rage if they come into contact with it (this is nonsense) AND this same story is also attributed to Topsy and is the reason poor Topsy ended getting horrifically electrocuted so that's odd - I feel like this is just one of those stories attributed to any elephant for the newspapers to report - AND he compared Bolivar's worn condyles to mammoths and modern elephants but doesn't mentions if these are captive or wild ellies which would seem to be important in ascertaining if this was from arthritis. He also suggests that Bolivar ground his teeth so badly he wore down the condyles but no elephant keeper I have spoken to has seen teeth grinding as a stereotype in elephants so that would be another Q for any elephant keepers on here. He certainly swayed and had rubbed his forehead on his bars and caused an ulcer on his head which thinned the skin there and was one of the reason his taxidermy didn't last. Anyway - if Sarus, you have any thoughts on that paper I would be really interested!

 

Bonnie,

Bolivar is like a lot of other individual elephants within the circus that were often touted as the largest, meanest, and rarest elephants in captivity. This is a factor of the classic “Barnum style” marketing strategy. It worked in most cases like and many circus acts were advertised in this fashion. It is most likely that Bolivar was named after Simón Bolívar the Venezuelan military leader from the early 1800’s. Other famous big elephant were named like this as well like you stated. Also, a “mad, dangerous” elephant is more likely to get more attention than a placid one. The cigar incident you mention is the one that I’ve found as well. Other account details him venting his frustration from musth on a person and a horse (killed both) and derailing a circus train car from the track! When he was at the zoo, he even rammed down a brick wall in the elephant house according to the Philadelphia Inquirer in July 1902.



Your exhibit:
I think it’s great that you are sharing Bolivar with a larger audience through an exhibit. I like your rendition of circus poster style artwork for the exhibit. Good job! As for the controversial photo, it’s all about context. Chances are if you state on a label on how elephant husbandry and management has drastically changed for the better within the last half century and how dangerous musth is for both the keeper and elephant, people I feel, are more likely to be sympathetic to how elephants were managed back in the early days. Having worked in a museum myself I personally know how frustrating it can be to reach people and given timelines, projects between various departments can be delayed weeks, even months at a time!

I’d like to see the exhibit but due to me being at the other end of the USA, being out of work (looking for a new museum job, preferably natural history), and cost of travel I unfortunately won’t be able to make it. However, you could download the Google Street View app for your phone, create 360 photo spheres (it uses your phone’s camera and meshes the images together into a 360) of views within the gallery of the exhibit and upload them to Google Maps. I did this for the temporary exhibits that were held at the museum I last worked at and the staff really thought it was a great initiative and plan on continuing it since they can still view the old exhibits that have moved on to other museums. I think a lot of members on here besides AmbikaFan and I would like to see it too.

Recreations:
I’m glad both you and @AmbikaFan like the recreations. I’ve been using Photoshop for a decade now, enjoy making recreations and as for the ones that I posted earlier, I took the Asian Elephant illustrations by Toni Llobet from the HMW elephant plate, did some “digital taxidermy” with the puppet warp tool and recreated the base by creating different layers, adding textures and merging them together. For example, once you make one post you can make duplicates! As for the skeleton I did the same thing. I took an illustration of an elephant skeleton manipulated it to look just like Bolivar’s. The glory of Photoshop! I did it under the “fair use principle”. If you want a photo real recreation, I can work on that as well. From my personal observations I’ve always thought that Bolivar looked a great deal like Tusko, the Asian bull from Thailand that was at the Oregon Zoo from 2005 till his death in 2015. He had a similarly shaped body, a large head and was 10 feet as well. In addition one of my future projects is to recreate Bolivar’s living quarters at the Philly Zoo in ZT2 so I guess I better get started on that as well.

Philly connection:
As far as being connected with someone in Philly, in summer 2017 I had a temporary job in the Philadelphia area. Since I knew that Bolivar’s remains were at the Academy, I made an appointment to see them before I finished up there (not sure if I can post photos to Zoochat of his remains/only got clearance to be in the documentary). He does indeed like AbikaFan said has tushes. I also was hoping to obtain high resolution still images for my short documentary then, but at the time the archives were being closed for renovations. Overall, the ANSP is a great mid-sized natural history museum dating back to the beginning of the 19th Century. If you’re in Philly for a trip to see Bolivar’s bones, set aside some time to see the dioramas. They just renovated the gorilla and takin diorama last year and I presume they’ll do the others in due time when they have more funding. The Giant Sable is my favorite! The 3rd floor also has some great dioramas on extinct North American birds including a massive Passenger Pigeon diorama. The Academy can be seen in a day. I’ve posted photos of the dioramas and exhibits in the gallery here on the site.

Thoughts on the Lippman paper:
I remember reading that paper about a year ago and was surprised that he had that condition as it was not brought up by any other resource I’ve read on him from the time and wasn't aware of it when I saw his cranium and mandible at ANSP behind the scenes. Otherwise I would've looked at the condyles closer in person. I myself have some mild TMJ issues as well so I can totally understand what Bolivar was going through! I agree with AmbikaFan that the old Philly Zoo 1940’s Paul Cret elephant house wasn’t the best facility. I strongly feel that it should’ve been modified for just the Indian Rhinos instead of just a Children’s Zoo and the other yards could have been joined together and made a top-notch exhibit for them.

In terms of social media, I’m not on Twitter. Sorry. Having a YouTube and Zoochat with other commitments going on such as looking for a new job is a lot to keep track of. Thanks for your fast response and let me know what type of recreation you’d like me to create! Long live the memory of Bolivar!

 

I'm finding this discussion very interesting and knew nothing about Bolivar the elephant before Bonnie mentioned him. What makes Bolivar particularly notable? Was he marketed as the successor to Jumbo or as the largest known Asian elephant or some such?