I’m doing a story about an elephant that died in Lenox, MA. in 1851. He died in a barn after suffering injuries from a fall off a bridge. The elephant weighed 6 tons. How do you think he was buried? My guess is they buried him where he died because moving the body would have been difficult with horses. Does anyone one have any thoughts? Thanks!
I’d say it was burned.
Lots and lots of branches and small trees piled on the body. Perhaps pitch or tar too if it’s available to make the fire hotter. Make a big bonfire.
I’ve seen news reports of decayed whales exploding.
You can’t ignore a dead elephant for very long.
I’d say they let knackers cut it into more manageable pieces, render the fat and so on before putting the rest on a pyre. Burial would be impractical due to sheer volume.
Thanks.
I should mention that the body was buried for a museum with plans to harvest the bones in 6 years. When the returned the carcass was still in decay, so he was reburied. That was the last anyone knew of his (Columbus) grave location. I have located where the barn would have been in 1851. Would Columbus be there too?
Maybe a team of professional grave diggers then? They’d need every gravedigger in that area to help dig.
Even today, it would take a backhoe a few hours to bury an elephant.
According to many accounts from the time, he was left to rot in the shed where he died for quite some time before being buried and exhumed and reburied years later.
No clear account of exactly how he was buried is found with a basic web search, but as Gukumatz and an old African proverb both say: “There’s only one way to eat an elephant; one bite at a time.”
Especially considering his decomposed state by the time he was buried it’s very likely that he was carried out in small pieces.
The bones never saw the light of day. Williams tried twice to find Columbus and both times they could not locate the grave.
Give Mike Rowe a call. He’s always looking for work.
Am I the only one that mentally added “Need answer quick!” to the end of the thread title?
If they couldn’t find his grave, I draw one of three conclusions: someone else had already taken the carcass and bones for another use, that he wasn’t buried in the shed, or that the college didn’t want him. Another use could be something like selling the bones to a collector. If he wasn’t buried in the shed, he would have had to be moved, likely not far. There may be local stories about where the body is. If the college didn’t want him, then he should still be on the farm where he died.
possibly relevant info:
Large horses were routinely left to rot on city streets in New York during the 1800’s.
So a rotting elephant wouldn’t have seemed as horrible as our modern sensibilities think.
Going from memory:
About 30 years ago, I had just moved to a new apt, and subscribed to the NewYork Times.I remember being surprised to read a fascinating article about archeology in the city.They were repaving a street, and under the asphalt found the old cobblestones, and under that something else, etc, etc. Which led the reporter to look into the history of who was responsible for taking care of the streets, etc. And he quoted old documents (maybe letters to the editor?) suggesting a new and apparently radical idea: that the city government should take on the responsiblity of removing dead animals from the streets. It gave the example of a large horse, which collapsed and died in the street, but was too heavy to move, so it just laid there all summer, rotting, drawing flies and of course, stinking.
It must have been a fairly common event, too…There were a lot of horses back then. Many of them were not the fast,sleek horses we see today at the Kentucky derby. They were huge beasts used for pulling very heavy wagons, weighing thousands of pounds.
Childhood joke:
A guy is at the circus and poking around off of the midway. He comes upon a man sitting on a hay bale, bawling his eyes out.
“What’s wrong?” the guy asks.
“Our biggest elephant just died!”
“You must have loved him very much.”
“No, I have to bury him!”
I suspect they probably dug a very shallow grave and built a cairn, rather than fully burying the thing. Especially if they planned to recover the bones.
Obligatory Monty Python reference: when I first read the thread title, I read it as “How to burrow through an elephant.”
That would account for the complaints about a smell as you approached the grave.
But that still leaves the problem of how you move the body into the grave.
A group of men with shovels can dig a hole as deep as necessary, or as shallow as they want.
Either way, you still have to fill the hole with a 6000 pound elephant.
I guess in this case they did need some steenking badgers.
If the story of Mary the elephant (photo in Wikipedia article may be disturbing to some) is any indication you dig the hole pretty much where the animal dies. Use a water hose to remove the last bit of earth. Let gravity do the work.
Why would you assume burial is the only option?
Tripler
They had creative (if not lazy) people back then. . .