Tuesday Trivia

Ever heard of Tusko the Elephant? He was a figure in Washington history in the 1920s. Here is the first paragraph of the story about Tusko found on www.historylink.org (the website for Washington history):

On May 15, 1922, Tusko the giant circus elephant rampages through the Skagit Valley town of Sedro-Woolley.  No circus elephant in twentieth-century America engendered more outlandish and comical tales than he. Captured at age 6 in the wilds of Siam (now Thailand), the animal was a mere five feet high when he lumbered off a sailing ship at New York harbor in 1898. Yet by 1922 circus hawkers touted him as “the largest elephant ever in captivity.” Although, at 10-feet-2-inches tall, he was seven inches shorter than Phineas T. Barnum’s Jumbo of the 1880s, Tusko was a good ton heavier than that better-known pachyderm. Even before Washingtonians set eyes on Tusko, they’d read newspaper accounts of his antics, from the night he did a “moonlight dance on the newly laid asphaltic pavement” of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to his unexpected defeat of six snorting killer bulls in an arena in Juarez, Mexico. But few stories rival the one about this tusker’s wild romp through the Skagit Valley logging town of Sedro-Woolley in 1922.

Click to the above link and do a search for “Tusko elephant” to read the entire story. Who knew???

 

One comment on “Tuesday Trivia

  1. Barbara Johnson says:

    Those of us in Skagit County know well the Legend of Tusko. Local papers write about him often. Glad I wasn’t around when he went on his “walk about” in Good ol’ Woolley.

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