The Place
Erwin, Tennessee seems to be a polite and patriotic town, where
campaign signs ask voters to "Please Elect...," then thank them in
advance. It's a place where many of the Main Street businesses mark the
Fourth of July by closing down for four days, and nobody seems to mind
the inconvenience.
In 1916, Erwin was a railroad boom town, home to the Cincinnati,
Clinchfield, and Ohio Railroad's repair facilities, "sprouting like a
boy growing too fast for his own britches," according to longtime
resident Hank S. Johnson. The population of Erwin (which was supposed to
be called Ervin, in honor of the man who donated 15 acres of land for
the town, but was misspelled by a postal worker) nearly tripled in the
first 16 years of the century. Makeshift boardwalks stretched above the
ankle-deep yellow mud in the streets.
The Clinchfield line used to carry coal out of the Tennessee mountains;
Clinchfield and Blue Ridge Pottery were the major employers in Erwin.
For decades, the railroad yards were the busiest place in town.
Now, the yards are quiet: pigeons roost in the old passenger station, and most of the tracks are dull from disuse.
This is where Murderous Mary, a five-ton cow elephant with the Sparks
Brothers Circus, was hung by the neck from Derrick Car 1400 on September
13, 1916. The story of why and how Mary died is, of course, obscured by
time and countless retelling: an example of the best and worst of oral
history. It is tragic, absurd, excessive: quintessential
turn-of-the-century America.
The Players
Charlie Sparks, the owner of Sparks World Famous Shows, was a
frustrated man. His circus was two-bit, compared to his southern rival,
John Robinson's Four Ring Circus and Menagerie. A circus's net worth was
measured in rolling stock and elephants: Sparks' dog-and-pony show
traveled in a mere 10 railroad cars, compared to Robinson's 42; Sparks
could boast of only five elephants compared to Robinson's dozen. Never
mind Barnum and Bailey -- 84 railroad cars was beyond Charlie Sparks'
reach.
So Charlie did the best he could, traveling around the South, putting
up advance posters and enticing folks with a noon circus parade prior to
the day's two performances. Sparks posters claimed a certain degree of
moral superiority:
"Twenty-five years of honest dealing with the public!"
"Moral, entertaining, and instructive!"
"The show that never broke a promise!"
What else did Sparks offer? Educated sea lions. Greasepainted and
powdered dogs and humans, posing like Greek statues. Clowns. The Man Who
Walks Upon His Head. And elephants.
Mary was billed as "the largest living land animal on earth"; her owner
claimed she was three inches bigger than Jumbo, P.T. Barnum's famous
pachyderm. At 30 years old, Mary was five tons of pure talent: she could
"play 25 tunes on the musical horns without missing a note"; the
pitcher on the circus baseball-game routine, her .400 batting average
"astonished millions in New York."
Rumor and exaggeration swarmed about Mary like flies. She was worth a
small fortune: $20,000, Charlie Sparks claimed. She was dangerous,
having killed two men, or was it eight, or 18?
She was Charlie Sparks' favorite, his cash cow, his claim to circus
fame. She was the leader of his small band of elephants, an exotic
crowd-pleaser, an unpredictable giant.
On Monday, September 11, 1916, Sparks World Famous Shows played St. Paul, Va., a tiny mining town in the Clinch River Valley.
Which is where drifter Red Eldridge made a fatal decision. Slight and
flame-haired, Red had nothing to lose by signing up with Sparks World
Famous Shows: he'd dropped into St. Paul from a Norfolk and Western
boxcar and decided to stay for a while. Taking a job as janitor at the
Riverside Hotel, Eldridge found himself pushing a broom and, then,
dreaming of moving on.
Eldridge was hired as an elephant handler and marched in the circus
parade that afternoon. It's easy to imagine that what he lacked in skill
and knowledge, he made up for with go-for-broke bravado. A small man
carrying a big stick can be a dangerous thing.
The Proceedings
No one denies that Mary killed Eldridge in Kingsport, Tenn. on
September 12, 1916. The details of why and how it happened, gathered
from oral-history tapes from the Archives of Appalachia at East
Tennessee State University, vary so wildly that they should be read with
skepticism, and no small dose of chagrin.
Version I. After the Kingsport performance, Red Eldridge was assigned
to ride Mary to a pond, where she could drink and splash with the other
elephants. According to W.H. Coleman, who at the tender age of 19
witnessed the "murder":
There was a big ditch at that time, run up through Center Street,
...And they'd sent these boys to ride the elephants... There was, oh, I
don't know now, seven or eight elephants... and they went down to water
them and on the way back each boy had a little stick-like, that was a
spear or a hook in the end of it... And this big old elephant reach over
to get her a watermelon rind, about half a watermelon somebody eat and
just laid it down there; 'n he did, the boy give him a jerk. He pulled
him away from 'em, and he just blowed real big, and when he did, he took
him right around the waist... and throwed him against the side of the
drink stand and he just knocked the whole side out of it. I guess it
killed him, but when he hit the ground the elephant just walked over and
set his foot on his head... and blood and brains and stuff just
squirted all over the street.
Version II. As reported in the September 13, 1916 issue of the Johnson
City Staff, Mary "collided its trunk vice-like [sic] about [Eldridge's]
body, lifted him 10 feet in the air, then dashed him with fury to the
ground... and with the full force of her biestly [sic] fury is said to
have sunk her giant tusks entirely through his body. The animal then
trampled the dying form of Eldridge as if seeking a murderous triumph,
then with a sudden... swing of her massive foot hurled his body into the
crowd."