Getting ahead of the pachyderms
Circus elephants’ escape captivated state in 1975
As the 1,500-pound animals rumbled past, circus employees — including the trainer — ran after them, even though it was pointless. The animals were too fast to catch on foot, and
speedsters did reach them, what were they supposed to do? The Asian elephants would toss them aside as if they were no more than puppies.
Lilly and Isa (pronounced ICE-uh), at 5or 6years old, were small children by elephant standards, and they had young legs and nervous demeanors. All it had taken for them to run in terror was the noisy toppling of a stack of steel poles during a temporary stop in Hugo, a southeast Oklahoma community called “Circus City, USA” because it served as the winter home for several circuses.
Not now, though. This was July 12, 1975, the heart of circus season, and the elephants had vanished into the dense and nearly impenetrable forest, overgrown and thorny in the full bloom of summer. Initially circus workers thought they’d catch the fleeing elephants quickly. These weren’t entirely wild animals. They lived in air-conditioned comfort, had plenty of fresh water and dined on watermelons and straw. The first scratch of brambles and they’d stop. Except they didn’t. In the ensuing weeks, the elephants were pursued by a posse, hunters and even a New York Times reporter who supposedly entered the woods wearing a finely tailored suit and left with his clothes in tatters. Although no part of the search involved athletics, Sports Illustrated sent a reporter, too. The story was picked up by news outlets across the country.
To hear John White tell it, the missing elephants made Oklahoma into something of a national laughingstock. How could Asian elephants elude capture? It was unusual. It was funny. But it was also dangerous, for the elephants as much as anyone else.
White, who lived in southeast Oklahoma at the time, recently authored a fictional account of the search, titled “One Fell Swoop!” Many of the characters have thinly veiled real-life counterparts, and White exaggerates certain events only slightly. Aside from a tendency to use folksy puns and metaphors, the novel is a good read, filled with detailed descriptions and told— White emphasizes— largely from the elephants’ perspective. White is a former vice president of advertising at
The Oklahoman.
White is most successful at characterizing the dangers the elephants faced. The lumbering pachyderms could easily get overheated and dehydrated. Despite their thick skin, knife-sharp thorns tore at them and left wounds. Isa’s and Lilly’s feet were susceptible to damage; foot injuries are a leading cause of death among captive elephants.
Bit by bit, as the elephants pushed through fences, encountered man-made structures and fought their way through the forest, they suffered pain and discomfort. Left out there much longer, White said, they could’ve died.
Elephant stampede
So how did this unlikely big game hunt come about?
Isa and Lilly had been brought to Hugo as members of the Carson and Barnes Circus, according to a somewhat mocking Sports Illustrated piece from August 1975. Along with three other young elephants, they were due to head south, again in temperature-controlled comfort, to join a circus in Mexico City.
Although the elephants were young, they already had learned to tote steel poles with their muscular trunks. They helped tear down and put up the circus tents. At some point during their layover in Hugo, though, a load of poles spilled and crashed to the ground, causing a bit of an elephant stampede. The others were caught before they got more than half mile away, but Isa and Lilly, who were unchained, fled quickly.
“It should be difficult not to notice two elephants escaping, but only a handful of people saw them skedaddle,” Sports Illustrated reported. “One was their handler, known only as Wade. Another was truck driver Dixie Loter, a hefty red-haired woman who does not bother to explain why she made a career out of driving a truckful of elephants.”
The seemingly mysterious Wade was, in fact, Wade G. Burck, who wrote in a 2011 blog post about what happened that day (http:// circusnospin.blogspot.com/ 2011/ 12/ elephant-escape-1975. html? m=1).
“The elephants were so green, (a colleague) Okie advised me not to take the leg chains off but to instead just take them off the picket chain leaving the leg chains on, so they walked dragging eight foot of chain on one back leg with the front leg chain thrown over their necks.
“When we arrived in Oklahoma to water and off load the equipment that had been put in the truck to be returned to winter quarters, Isa and Lilly had pulled so hard on their chains they were ‘locked’ through the ring and I couldn’t get them out. I offloaded the other three and put them on the picket line that had been strung between two semi tractors and took the chains off Isa and Lilly and brought them out.
“As I was putting new leg chains on them there was a loud crashing and banging as they threw some tent poles out of the truck and the three on the picket line screamed and lunged forward, jerking the bumpers off the two tractors the chain was attached to. The picket chain hit me in the back of the legs and knocked me down, and in an instant it was ‘off to the races,’ two elephants loose and three on the back leg chain dragging the bumpers, with me in hot pursuit.
“We ran for about a half a mile and as they were running down a hill, one of the elephants on the picket line ... fell, and I was able to grab a bumper and a bit of chain and wrap it around a tree securing them. As I rolled over and got back to my knees I looked up just in time to see Isa and Lilly’s butts as they went down a ditch, through a barb wire fence, and across the interstate.”
‘Flurry of interest’
The New York Times reported July 21, 1975, “a flurry of interest” in finding the elephants, especially after the circus offered a $150 reward. Less ambitious hunters drove slowly along back roads, hoping to find a glimpse of the animals, while others rolled through the area on dirt bikes and dune buggies. A sheriff’s posse and “a handful of volunteer cowboys” braved the actual forest, as did Loter, who set out on a foot safari every day. An Oklahoma City pilot flew his plane over the area, but the dense canopy hid any sign of the escapees.
National publications seemed drawn to the story by a sense of superiority. Sports Illustrated called it “an elephant hunt of highly comic proportions,” and the Times related Sheriff James Buchanan’s embarrassment at not being able to find the animals. Buchanan knew how congested and large the forest was; out-of-towners didn’t. He took at least one reporter into the woods to demonstrate that the elephants could be 25 feet away but remain virtually invisible.
The Oklahoman remained largely impartial, although some stories seem to have been written with tongue in cheek. Five days after the escape, the newspaper published a story about local reactions to the elephant chase. Animal trainer Bob Jenni described the area around Lake Hugo as “an elephant’s Shangri-La.” One woman said she didn’t know the pachyderms were missing, and Mrs. Joyce Higgins said she and her husband feared only for the safety of their fences.
“My husband says they won’t jump a fence,” Higgins said, explaining why the couple was leaving all the gates open. Asked what she’d do if she came faceto-face with an elephant in her garden, she said: “I imagine I’d go out the other door. Something like that would be unusual.”
But Burck recognized the futility of most efforts to catch the elephants. Everyone wanted to locate them, he wrote, but few outside the circus knew what to do if they found them.
Home in Hugo
Lilly and Isa kept the world waiting for a couple weeks before they were discovered.
On July 29, 1975, Lyndol Fry— a Choctaw County special deputy — shot Isa twice with a tranquilizer gun, The Oklahoman reported. Two days later, Fry shot Lilly once in the hindquarters. The shootings made Fry perhaps the only hunter to bag two elephants on American soil.
Lilly fought off the tranquilizer for as long as she could but collapsed about 30 minutes later. About 15 minutes before she went down, chains were secured to her legs to prevent her from running away again.
The elephants may have welcomed capture. They could return to their earlier lives, where they didn’t have to forage for food or search for water. Their wounds were treated and healed.
Now, nearly 42 years later, both elephants are back in Hugo, most likely for good. They’re under the care of the Endangered Ark Foundation, a nonprofit founded by D.R. Miller, who owned the circus and the elephants in 1975. The foundation provides a home for Asian elephants, born there or retired from circus life.
Arlinda Copeland, Endangered Ark director, said Isa and Lilly — who have been residents for at least 20 years — are healthy, happy and a favorite of children who come to visit. That’s due in part to Oklahoma author Una Belle Townsend’s 2012 children’s book, “The Great Elephant Escape,” based on Isa and Lilly’s story.
Elephants don’t survive much past 40 in the wild, but Isa and Lilly are pushing 50 and should have many more years ahead of them. Thanks to constant veterinary care and a safe refuge, Ark elephants tend to live longer, some into their upper 60s.
“They live in the luxury of our spa, I like to say,” Copeland said.
White, the “One Fell Swoop!” author, said the elephants’ story is something that has stuck with him for decades. For those few weeks in 1975, Hugo was a magical place, home to creatures almost as improbable as unicorns.
“Maybe,” he mused, perhaps not in seriousness, “we need more elephants roaming the country.”