Seeing the Elephant
Tom Simon, in one of his typically luminous essays, on the topic of why Americans fear dragons, reports that, as a matter of fact, they do not.
In part, he has this to say:
Our composite American has never shied away from fantasy or the imagination. He loved tall tales long before he learnt to read; and since he grew up in a landscape of wild and wonderful possibilities, he did not much care whether the tall tales were strictly impossible or not.
He is equally delighted with Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. He will swallow the feats of Natty Bumppo, which are flatly impossible without being magical, right along with the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which are magical and might not be quite impossible.
He has the advantage of loving adventure stories, and the greater advantage of living in a land where adventure has never been banished ‘beyond the fields we know’ into the realms of fantasy. He likes to play at being a juvenile Don Quixote, like Tom Sawyer, or a juvenile Marco Polo, like Huckleberry Finn. He doesn’t believe in dragons — quite — but he has cousins who went West by covered waggon and turned back because they ‘saw the elephant’.
He likes taking day trips into the future, conducted by the folks at the circus of science fiction, even though he knows that one day the voyage will be as permanent and estranging as Rip Van Winkle’s. He enjoys travelling abroad, where he entertains himself by pretending to be a barbarian to scandalize the snobs; he had great fun playing this game in King Arthur’s court.
His chief official hero is George Washington, a real person credited with doing things that never happened, like chopping down the celebrated cherry tree. His unofficial heroes include Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck, entirely unreal persons who somehow managed to accomplish all sorts of perfectly real things.
American adventure fiction takes reality and fantasy, magic and technology, sober exploration and wild travellers’ yarns, chucks them all up together in the air as high as they will go, and makes a glorious game of taking them just as they fall. It may happen to exclude the elements of fantasy in particular instances, but it has no prejudice against them; and neither, we must conclude, has its audience.
“Saw the elephant” is an expression I had not heard before, which is surprising, since I was raised in Southern California, and Spanish Explorers and the Gold Rush formed, for grammar schoolboys there, as great as part of lessons in history, as the Civil War for schoolboys in Virginia, or the Revolutionary War for schoolboys in New York
But it is, apparently, a phrase from the Gold Rush:
“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 confessed they’d seen more than enough of the animal.
“The expression predated the gold rush, arising from a tale current when circus parades first featured elephants. 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,’ the farmer said, ‘for I have 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, and unequaled experience, the adventure of a lifetime.”
from THEY SAW THE ELEPHANT: WOMEN IN THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH by JoAnn Levy
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
