By Gary Topping–
During my career as a historian, I have conducted a number of oral history interviews. We do these interviews when we can find a participant in an event that is otherwise poorly documented. Of course we always prefer contemporary documentation to remembered recollections because all of us have flawed memories. Most of the time, those flawed memories result in a story that is embellished into something more colorful or dramatic than the actual facts. Imagine, then, my astonishment when, some years ago, I discovered that one of my own family’s cherished legends turned out to be less colorful and dramatic in memory than in fact.
Few news stories from rural southern Idaho ever make the New York Times, but this one did, and that is how I was able to check the legend against the fact. You can look it up for yourself, in the Times of May 27, 1907. I will tell the story as it appears in the paper, and note where there are colorful details missing in the family legend as I remember it.
On May 26, 1907, my grandparents, John Wesley and Ermina Daniel Bell and their family were living in Twin Falls, Idaho, where my grandfather was a self-employed blacksmith (this was almost exactly six years before my mother’s birth). There was little public entertainment in those days, so when the Sells-Floto circus came to town, everyone went. As my grandparents and their family started walking toward the big tents, my grandmother said to her husband (in the quiet voice I remember so well, with its distinctive Tennessee accent), “Wes, you’d better go back and get your pistol.” They waited while he did, and it turned out to be a very good thing. (I’ve seen that pistol, which I fairly confidently remember as a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson.)
At the circus, an attendant was attempting to feed a large Bengal tiger when somehow the cage came open and the animal escaped. It rushed into the crowd, killed a four-year-old girl, and started toward my grandparents. My grandfather gathered his family behind him and methodically emptied his pistol into the large cat. Stunned, the tiger ran out of the tent. At this point (not in the family legend), my grandfather calmly emptied the cylinder of his revolver and reloaded. When the cat came back in, he was waiting. But no more shots were necessary: the tiger crumpled and fell over, dead. Later (also not in the family legend), an autopsy revealed that every one of my grandfather’s bullets had hit a vital organ and would have been sufficient, by itself, to have killed the tiger.
Even later, the grateful people of Twin Falls presented my grandfather with a watch fob made from one of the tiger’s claws. For a little kid like me, that polished claw was very impressive. I hope one of my distant cousins still has it and knows what it is. My grandmother kept the pistol, too. She was equally adept with it, and used it to shoot jackrabbits.
Some of my readers no doubt will draw the lesson from this story that carrying weapons is a good thing because you never know what might happen. I see it differently. My grandfather was an expert marksman working at short range and in a circumstance where the rules of engagement were completely unambiguous. I strongly suspect, by contrast, that most concealed carry permit holders these days are fearful people with only the most fuzzy ideas of how and when to use their weapons. They might feel safer with that kind of poorly controlled firepower, but I sure don’t.
The lesson I prefer to draw is leave wild animals in their natural habitat and don’t cage them up.
