Bad Elephant Far Stream: Where It Cam From by Samuel Hawley

Bad Elephant Far Stream: Where It Came From by Samuel Hawley

The idea for what ultimately became my novel Bad Elephant Far Stream sprang from some research I did on the early history of motion pictures, trolling for ideas for my next nonfiction book. I stumbled on a Kinetoscope film entitled “Electrocuting an Elephant,” made by the Edison Company more than a century ago. The film (which can be easily found on Youtube) shows the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on Coney Island on January 4, 1903.

“Electrocuting an Elephant” led me to start researching circus elephants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was amazed at the accounts I turned up of elephants being euthanized because they had killed somebody or gone on a rampage or otherwise done something that got them labeled “wicked” or “bad.” They were being poisoned and shot and hanged from steam winches—and in the unusual case of Topsy, electrocuted with lines running from the Edison Electrical Company’s Coney Island power station.

I thought that this would make an interesting book, the euthanizing of all these elephants back then. What was going on with these creatures? Why were they turning “bad”? What were their lives like? Why were they being killed? I soon realized, though, that in order to tell a compelling story, I needed to focus on just one elephant. So I decided to tell the story of Topsy.

After doing a good deal of research, I set out to write a nonfiction book with the title Bad Elephant: The Odyssey from Birth to Execution of a Circus Pachyderm. Nonfiction, after all, was all I’d written up to that point. I found, however, that in struggling to “get inside” Topsy, I was veering deep into fiction territory. I also wanted to give the story some hope and a happy ending. The result was the novel Bad Elephant Far Stream.

There was something else too that drove me to write Bad Elephant Far Stream as a novel in the way that I did. It was the realization that books about animals rarely are actually about the animal at all, but rather are about human main characters, with the animal serving as a prop. The animal is there for the human characters to fight about, to get emotional over, to learn about themselves from. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to tell the story of the human who found redemption or true love or whatever through his relationship with big ol’ cuddly elephant Topsy. I wanted to make Topsy herself the main character. I wanted to make her life experience and her quest the focus of the story—to step outside my human viewpoint and try to image what life was like for her. The result of my struggle to do this was Bad Elephant Far Stream.