Behemoth by Ronald B. Tobias

Author:Ronald B. Tobias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Barnum named his newest elephant America. Columbia, who would turn two years old in a month, was losing her cachet as a baby. Every day she grew a little larger and looked more like the other elephants in her herd. Barnum even sounded apologetic in his advertisements:

Some may come to see

COLUMBIA,

The Baby Elephant, born here two years ago. No

longer an infant in arms, but one of the best

performers in the lot.24

Barnum saw the chance to replace Columbia with America so he could continue to exploit the public’s fondness for baby elephants. After all, Hachaliah Bailey had supposedly swapped Mogul for Columbus and people barely noticed.

By the following morning, however, Barnum changed her name to Bridgeport, in honor of his hometown in Connecticut. By his reckoning, if Columbia had been worth $100,000, then Bridgeport was worth three times that much, so he insured her for $300,000 for an annual premium of $52,000—a thousand dollars a week at a time when the average wage earner made twenty cents an hour. “All my thoughts and cares at present are locked up in two trunks,” Barnum wrote, “one of which belongs to Jumbo and the other to little Bridgeport.”

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