Old news from the Way back Machine

It was about 5:30 in the afternoon. Fred Alspaw, chief elephant trainer for the Sells-Floto Circus, was lazing with some crew members after setting up the big top and menagerie at Hebert's Field in Salinas.

Alspaw and the men needed their rest. Later that night, they'd have to break it all down and load up the train for the next night's show in Monterey. The date was April 25, 1912, a day that history would be made in Salinas.

The event that was to focus the eyes of science on Salinas was heralded by a chorus of trumpeting elephants. There arose such a commotion that Alspaw imagined something dreadful was happening.

Whatever it was, the lions and other big cats got wind of it and roared and wailed like banshees. The monkeys went ape.

When Alspaw arrived at the line of tethered elephants, he got the surprise of his life. There, in danger of being trampled to death by a pachyderm named Princess Alice, was the pinkish form of a baby elephant.

The baby was the first elephant bred and born in the United States. Up to that time, two baby elephants had been born within the nation's borders, one in Wisconsin and the other in Ohio. But the Salinas newborn was the first to be conceived and born in the country.

The historic event was almost short-lived. Momma elephants sometimes reject their young, but Alice seemed to go beyond that and tried to kill the baby. Alspaw got some crew members to distract Alice while he snatched the baby away.

It wasn't easy. The baby weighed 180 pounds and had a 6-inch trunk. Except for a few coarse hairs, the body was bare and tinged pink.

Alspaw later said he regretted not getting more precise statistics for the benefit of science. But there was no time for that, with Alisal and the other elephants raging and the calf in immediate need of care.

No circus can ignore good publicity, and the Sells-Floto people made a beeline to the telegraph office to send news of "one of the greatest zoological events in the history of the western continent," as the Salinas Index called it, around the world.

Having saved the calf from being crushed to death by its mother, Alspaw had to figure out a way to feed it. Ten quarts of cow's milk diluted with burnt brandy and limewater did the trick. In the meantime, zoologists and naturalists heard the news and flocked to Salinas to the see the new arrival.

With all the attention, the baby elephant needed a name. "Little Salinas" was the first choice, but that moniker lasted only about a day or so. The circus finally settled on "Baby Hutch" after Fred Hutchison, manager of the circus.

The Salinas Chamber of Commerce did its civic part, presenting the baby and its mother with gold-embroidered trappings. It was an appropriate color because wherever the circus went, crowds flocked to see Baby Hutch.

As time passed, Hutch developed the personality of an orphan, newspaper reports said. Treated with indifference by his mother and father, a husky beast named Schneider, Hutch seemed to think of his human handlers as parents.

But this story has a sad ending. In the early summer of 1912, the circus was in Pendleton, Ore., and Hutch, who appeared to be thriving with all of the human attention, suddenly became ill and died. Pneumonia was pinned as cause of death.

Princess Alice, for all of her indifference to the calf, appeared to suffer an emotional breakdown. She engaged in a half-hour session of "weird trumpeting" as if bewailing her loss.

People say nothing important ever happens in Salinas. But somewhere in elephant heaven, the first pachyderm bred and born on U.S. soil since the demise of the woolly mammoth has "Salinas" stamped on its birth certificate.

Courtesy of Joey Ratliff