Time: January 20-24
Place: Chicago Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois
Event: My recent 4 day trip to Chicago
“Cats are like women, and women are like cats”
-Willy Holderied, (famous Munich/German artisan)
It was a glorious dream. A magnificent undertaking. It was the stuff of lore. And Britain, the greatest Empire the world has ever known, would show what one small nation could accomplish on such a colossal scale.
The plan was simple. Build a continuous railway system from the tip of South Africa all the way north and out the top of Egypt. This enormous vein of teak and steel would bleed Africa dry of its incredible wealth, all to the glory of England. Timber, gold, Egyptian cotton, animal pelts, precious stones and other exotics were waiting for the taking for he who would be the most bold.
But they ran into a problem.
Death was a frequent visitor in Africa as it was. Malaria, Cholera, Yellow Fever, Sleeping Sickness, infection and lack of medical care rightly earned Africa its legendary name- “White mans grave”. But in an area called Tsavo, now in the country of Kenya, they were confronted with evil like never before.
One by one, men started dying and disappearing. A scream here, a yell there, a desperate plea for help that came too late and stories of a nameless malice that stalked those terrified railway workers. Remnants of bodies, trails of blood, a discovered arm and sketchy sightings plagued the workers camps.The body count began to grow, and what seemed initially like a few small incidents of wild animals attacking man, swelled. Something in the shadows had grown a sweet tooth for human flesh.
It didn't take long for the locals to put a name to this “Ghost in the darkness”.
2 lions had begun to prey on all those working. The suddenness and stealth with which they struck was awe inspiring. What started as a few deaths had now rose to dozens, yes even scores of dead. Like a Voo-Doo curse that Tsavo had thrust upon them, it seems as if this fever of killing would not abate.
In a climate of such fear, the railroad project froze with fear. Workers en-masse went home and chose to battle poverty and uncertainty over the threat of a carnal death. Gnawed, nibbled, clawed, torn apart, eaten, dismembered and devoured- 135 workers never made it to their next paychecks.
Having his rail road bridge project now ground to a halt, the project manager, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson had some time on his hands. Putting aside the construction, he now fell back on his military career. Patterson set traps and tried several times to ambush the lions at night from a tree. Alas, with no success. Finally on the 9th of December, 1898 Patterson bagged the first beast. Twenty days later the second Lion also fell dead to his tenacity and marksmanship. The fever had passed. The evil extinguished, and the construction crew returned to work on the railroad bridge which would be completed in February of 1899.
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Behind the scenes:
The incident with the Tsavo Lions was told in the Val Kilmer film “Ghost in the Darkness”
(This next paragraph was taken from Wikipedia)
The first lion killed measured nine feet, eight inches (3 m) from nose to tip of tail. It took eight men to carry the carcass back to camp. After 25 years as Patterson's floor rugs, the lions' skins were sold to the Chicago Field Museum in 1924 for a sum of US$5,000. The lions' skins arrived at the museum in very poor condition. The lions were then reconstructed and are now on permanent display along with the original skulls. Patterson's accounts were published in his 1907 book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.
My Photographs from the Chicago Museum of Natural History
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