The great circus elephant stampede—Laramie 1909

Oct 23

Written By Albany County Historical Society

It’s hard to imagine the excitement when the Ringling Bros. train with over 40 cars pulled into Laramie. The town and countryside had been plastered with billboards months in advance. Its spectacle of July 30, 1909 left everyone talking for years.

Arrives before dawn

The circus train always moved at night, pulling in before daybreak. Crew members, some doubling as performers, knew exactly what their jobs were as everything was unloaded. That July morning in 1909 the circus train occupied sidings extending from Third and Bradley Streets, where Safeway is now, to the stockyards then located north of Curtis Street.

The elephants rode smoothly just behind the locomotive; the elephant handlers rode with them. Smaller elephants were in a semi-circle with heads toward the central door; bull elephants were face-to-face, usually four to a car.

At smaller venues like Laramie, the stop was for one day only. After the evening performance, the tents would be struck and loaded precisely. The train was under way by 3 a.m. to its next stop, Rawlins.

Parade downtown

All traveling circuses paraded through town in the morning as the tents were being erected. Laramie’s parade in 1909 began at 10 a.m. There were at least 8 elephants, 3 marching bands, 40 mounted horses, and many horse-drawn wagons with animals and costumed performers.

The goal was to leave the viewers anxious to purchase tickets for the afternoon and evening shows. Some said the parade was a mile long and lasted nearly an hour. A Laramie Republican newspaper reporter assigned to the story was enthralled by teams of camels and zebras, plus two teams of 24-horse-hitches pulling colorful wagons.

The stars of the parade were the elephants and steam calliope that could be heard all over town. One Laramie youngster admired the elephants marching along single file, each with its trunk holding the tail of the one ahead.

An elephant stampede!

That 1909 Laramie Ringling Bros. parade had an unexpected, exciting, and perhaps frightening attraction—an elephant stampede.

It started when a small bulldog pup belonging to Dr. Lane barked and nipped the tail of one elephant. Sources disagree whether it was five or eight elephants that broke loose, crossed the tracks and wreaked havoc on the West Side before reaching the Laramie River.

With a little pun, the newspaper writer said the elephants, “after getting their trunks out of the car,” decided to go swimming. They headed to the river, “crossing at its deepest part, and taking the porch off a residence along the way.” The Territorial Prison, recently converted to an experiment station, lost crops and wire fences that the elephants plowed through effortlessly.

Swedish born Nathaniel “Nate” A. Johnson (1877-1952) was on his way to Laramie in a horse-drawn wagon from his ranch on the Big Laramie that morning. He had finished chores and left his brother, 17-year-old Wesley Johnson, in charge. Nate was eager to be at the home on the West Side where his wife Anna Berglund Johnson was about to give birth to their first child. As the Laramie River came into view, he was startled to see a herd of elephants headed toward him.

Johnson averted disaster by unhitching his team to save the wagon and leading the horses away. By that time men were giving chase to the elephants, and chaos at the river was developing.

Nate told Wesley later that the elephants took a “good bath” in the river. Most kept going, some in the stream bed, and others took to the road leading out of town. The many ranchers coming into town for the circus were also startled by elephants in their path, and many a team of horses ran away. The story became part of Wesley’s recently published memoir.

The chase is on

Elephant superintendent William Emery and the head animal trainer “Doc” Kealey determined that one way to coax the huge animals back to town was to use two more docile elephants; three men and two elephants went after the runaways. They found all but one. At departure time for the circus train, that one elephant was still missing. The train left with three elephants and three men still in Laramie.

The current owner of the house at 620 S. 7th Street says that she’s been told that her high-ceiling carriage house on Sheridan Street once housed an elephant. It might have held more than one if it was put to temporary use as an elephant pen once the runaway had been coaxed back by the two elephants used in the capture. It was two weeks before adequate transportation could be lined up by the circus so the men and elephants could rejoin them.

Nate Johnson and his family had great fun telling little Helen Johnson that she had been born when there was an elephant in the back yard. No doubt there were many other stories passed on to West Side neighbors—most missed it because they were all at the parade.

Ringling dominates in 1909

One reason the Ringling Bros. dominated the circus world was that there were seven of them. All were involved in owning or managing the logistically-challenging enterprise—though none of them were performers. They were sons of a German-born harness maker, August Rungeling, (soon changed to Ringling), who immigrated in 1847 and settled in Baraboo, Wisconsin. He married a French immigrant, Salome Juliar. Their sons were born between 1852 and 1868.

Jerry Apps has written that the US fascination with circuses started with a Philadelphia show imported from England in 1793. An American had the idea to use a tent and move the circus—even to towns where there was no big arena. Soon many circuses crisscrossed the country.

A chance purchase of farmland in Delavan, Wisconsin by one of these circus entrepreneurs led to others moving there too for winter quarters. Apps estimates that between 1847 and 1894 there were 26 separate circuses wintering in Delavan. Eventually Ringling Bros. would settle 100 miles north in Baraboo for its winter quarters. Baraboo is now home to a circus museum and brings out its extensive stock of circus wagons for a one-day parade annually.

The young Ringling brothers took advantage of the market developed by the pioneers and produced their first circus in 1884. The Ringlings, through hard work, “tremendous business savvy, and some luck, created the greatest circus in the world,” writes Apps. He added, “The Ringling brothers became very wealthy men, one fifty-cent ticket at a time.”

On their road to success, the Ringlings acquired many smaller circuses, and in 1906 bought the biggest one in the US, the Barnum & Bailey Circus. The latter had absorbed some of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show assets, and in 1908 for one year only, the Ringlings got William Cody to rejoin and put on his show with Barnum & Bailey before they parted ways.

Circus wars

Each of the two circuses operated under their own names for a while even though the Ringlings owned both. They played in different towns, not competing. So, it was just the “Ringling Bros.” show in Laramie in 1909. Hard times during World War I contributed to cause the merger of both shows into one circus in 1918, adding the Barnum & Bailey name to Ringling Bros.

Fierce competition developed with the few remaining circuses. One that was especially desperate to hold out from Ringling was the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. It was scheduled to open in Laramie on June 18, 1909. Advance men for each competed in Laramie for feed contracts, city licenses, and especially bill posting.

Hagenbeck’s people gave press interviews, saying that they doubted that Ringling would show up on July 30. With exaggeration typical of all circus advertising, they claimed Hangenbeck would bring on June 18 the only trained animal acts, along with 1,000 people, 600 animals and 20 acres of tents. There may have been some hyperbole in that, but even if it brought half that number it was destined to be a Laramie spectacle.

A Boomerang headline on June 14 read “The Circus Fight Growing Fierce” about troubles the Hagenbeck Circus was experiencing in Denver. But on June 18, it arrived in 42 railroad cars. A big crowd was on hand to see the unloading and 10 a.m. parade.

Forty-two days later, on July 30, 1909, the Ringling Bros. circus arrived, also generating big crowds, and bringing about the same number of train cars, performers, crew, animals and tents as Hagenbeck’s. No doubt there were some unexpected bills to be paid by the Ringlings for damages by elephants and rental of barns needed to house three elephants for a couple of weeks, but the excitement left by two big circuses in one summer was an incredible highlight for Laramie and a boon to local businesses.

Lack of newspaper advertisements indicate that Ringling didn’t come to Laramie after 1909 but did play Cheyenne in 1913. The California Circus Corporation brought its “101 Ranch Wild West Show and International Congress of Circus Stars and Thrills” to Laramie on July 17, 1946. It played at the old fair grounds at 18th and Grand Avenue, indicating it moved by truck, not train.

Ringling Bros closed forever in 2017. The 1952 Cecil B. DeMille movie extravaganza “Greatest Show on Earth” about Ringling’s circus preserves a lot of the performances and especially the “circus train” that delighted rail fans—Ringling continued to use trains right up to the end. Elephant acts had been discontinued in 2015 after pressure from animal rights advocates; a common sentiment was that a circus just wasn’t a circus without elephants.

By Judy Knight

Editor’s Note: Much more information is in two books at Coe Library: “Ringlingville USA,” (2005), by Jerry Apps and, “The Circus Moves by Rail,” (1978), by Tom Parkinson and Charles Philip Fox. The Wyoming Newspaper Project, a website of all Wyoming newspapers, was the source of accounts of the circuses in Laramie, along with the 1973 memoir of Wesley Johnson that will soon be available for purchase at the Wyoming Women’s History House. Judy Knight is Collection Manager at the Laramie Plains Museum.