Seeing The Elephant

“I think I may without vanity affirm I have “seen the elephant” – Louisa Clappe (author of the famous Dame Shirley letters from Gold Rush California)

Quoted in They Saw The Elephant  – Women in the California Gold Rush by Jo Ann Levy

A Heroic Quest

It was a saying of the gold rush days – if you’d been there, you’d “seen the elephant”

Jo Ann Levy explains just what this was all about in the Introduction to her fascinating social history They Saw The Elephant.

As she explains, before the Gold Rush, most of those heading west were destined for Oregon.  But once the word was out about gold in 1849, that all changed.   California was the place to go, and in that first ‘gold year’ more than 25,000 overlanders called themselves 49ers.

They were joined in 1850 by another 44,000 adventurers. By the decade’s close, those who had trekked to California to see for themselves exceeded 180,000.

Pachyderm Magic

Jo Ann explains the magic:

“So dramatic an enterprise spread across so forbidding and enticing a canvas as the American West at once assumed heroic proportions.  The pioneers themselves first endowed their quest with mythic qualities. For as though the buffalo was not exotic animal enough for the landscape, gold seekers enhanced the wondrous journey with a marvelous and mysterious elephant. 

“To forty-niners and those following, no expression characterized the California Gold Rush more than the words “seeing the elephant.”  Those planning to travel west announced they were “going to see the elephant.” Those turning back claimed they had seen “the elephant’s tracks” or “the elephant’s tail, and admitted the view as sufficient.

Have You Saw It?

“Wagon drivers painted colorful names like Prairie Bird on their canvas covers, and one teamster scribbled on his the words, ‘Have You Saw the Elephant?’

“Of it another forty-niner observed “As matters turned out, this last legend, notwithstanding its bad grammar, was the most appropriate and prophetic of all.”

Jo Ann says that the expression preceded the gold rush, arising from a tale current when circus parades first featured elephants.

A Homely Tale

A farmer, so the story went, hearing that a circus was in town, loaded his wagon with vegetables for the market there. He had never seen an elephant and very much wished to. On the way to town he encountered the circus parade, led by an elephant.

“The farmer was thrilled. His horses, however were terrified. Bolting, they overturned the wagon and ruined the vegetables.  “I don’t give a hang,” said the farmer. “I’ve seen the elephant.”

For gold rushers the elephant symbolized both the high cost of their endeavor – the myriad possibilities for misfortune on the journey or in California, and, like the farmer’s circus elephant, an exotic sight, an unequaled experience, the adventure of a lifetime.

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