Imagine this: It’s 1888 and you are a small child living on a ranch on the Mail Ridge Road in northern Mendocino County. You see the dust of travelers coming along the roadway and run down the ranch road because you don’t believe what your eyes see.
Coming down the road is an elephant. You know it is an elephant because you saw a drawing on one in a school book. And next to the elephant walks a camel, a very unusual one pure white in color. These animals are under the control of three attendants moving them along. You run to get your Mom to come out and see this amazing sight because no one would ever believe you when you say what you saw on the road.
Yes, this really happened in 1888. It was one of those history mysteries that leaves a historian asking why and how?
Back in these early days of travel taking a boat from San Francisco to Humboldt Bay was the fastest way to go. There was constant shipping traffic as finished lumber and farm products came down from the north and trade goods were shipped up from the south. Road transportation was sketchy with wagon roads crossing rivers and summiting the Coast Range making progress slow.
So it was no surprise a circus troop would choose water transportation when they could. Once the circus did perform non Eureka it would have to travel wagons roads to go east, but for now they looked forward to an ocean voyage.
The first big circus scheduled to reach Eureka was the Forepaugh Circus. Waiting on the docks of San Francisco Bay the circus discovered they had a problem when it came to getting two creatures on board. Empress the elephant and Nebo, an albino camel, didn’t fit. They were just too BIG.
While a stack of timbers can rest on the open deck of a ship in wind and rain animals were not going to be standing still on the ever shifting deck. So what to do?
It’s about 200 miles from San Francisco to Eureka. An open boat deck could accommodate the two animals on a short voyage across the Golden Gate to Tiburon. From there the railroad ran north to the end of the line in Cloverdale. These animals were used to riding in open rail cars so they were loaded up with three attendants and taken to Cloverdale. Then the critters and crew began walking north to rejoin the circus in Eureka.
Newspaper accounts told of children in awe by the sides of the road as they progressed through Mendocino County along the Russian bRiver, then beyond Willits and Long Valley they started up the Mail Ridge/Bell Springs Road. They did have some problems. It was reported “Mrs. Fowzer, while traveling the Walker Ridge grade, had a serious accident befall her when the circus animals appeared. Her horse took fright and backed off the road and overturned the wagon. These animals caused considerable consternation among the horses.”
They overnighted in a stage coach barn in Harris in Humboldt County, then descended towards the Van Duzen River in Carlotta, where a logging train took the weary crew and animals into Eureka to rejoin the circus. Now wouldn’t that have been something to see.
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