A
tough job for the cowboys...
If someone told me that there had been a cattle stampede in
Gonzales, Texas, I wouldn’t doubt it one bit. But, elephants on
the rampage? Yep, it’s a fact; elephants did stampede in this
town in 1949. In
the 1940s and early 1950s, Gonzales was the winter quarters for
the Dailey Brothers Circus and the land they occupied was on the
southeast side of town. The main entrance was located near the
intersection of St. Vincent and Fair streets.
The
local kids didn’t have to wait for the circus to come to town;
it was here all winter. Many of the youngsters would hang around
the circus grounds seeking a glimpse of the animals and perhaps
even getting some part-time work.
According to old copies of The
Gonzales Inquirer, the Dailey Brothers Circus was very
important to the local economy. It was considered such an asset,
that when the Daileys decided to relocate their winter quarters to
Florida, city officials here became very concerned. Representatives
from the Gonzales Chamber of Commerce flew to Florida and
persuaded the Dailey boys to move the circus back to Gonzales. In
one Inquirer
article, the Daileys commented that they hadn’t realized how
much the Gonzales folks wanted them to stay and they were happy to
move back. The circus employees seemed to get along okay with the
local citizens and everything was going just fine until the day of
“the stampede.”
The Gonzales Inquirer described the happenings of that day in
the following article. The
Gonzales Inquirer • April 7, 1949— [Headline: Elephants
Stampede At Dailey Brothers Circus] Things
are quiet at the Dailey Brothers circus lot, today, but for two
hours late Tuesday, bedlam would have been tame by comparison. Eighteen bulls out of the circus herd of 21 elephants went on a rampage and stampeded out the winter quarters of the
circus to roar across the
southeast end of Gonzales for more than two hours before all were
rounded up and corralled in their barn to quiet down. With
the consent of owner Ben C. Davenport, the herd had been moved to
a ravine at the far end of the old fair grounds to a heavily
wooded section not far from the Guadalupe River. The animals had been arranged to pass in a group before the camera, but they were sluggish and refused to be speeded. Davenport dispatched two cowboys, mounted on horses, to the rear of the herd and allowed them to shoot
several rounds from .44 caliber pistols. The
combination of prancing horses and barking pistols frightened the
herd and they started off without warning, trumpeting loudly and
storming for distance in all directions. The
herd, all but one — Little Butch — was safe before sunset. It
was not until many hours later that Little Butch was located in
the woods, six miles out, and brought home in Davenport’s
Cadillac. Two
men were slightly hurt in the stampede, Rex Williams, 26, former
Marine, a head elephant man with the circus, was bumped by a bull
and sent flying probably 20 feet. He was cut and bruised. Raymond
Freivogal, 30, utility man, who was in front of the herd, made a
leap for safety and stumbled as the elephants advanced. He fell
between two logs that had been rolled into place for props, and
this proved to be the lucky accident that saved his life. The
herd stormed over and past him, kicking the logs as it went by,
but none tramped on Freivogal. He was bruised as the logs squeezed
against him, and scratched by the bark, but was otherwise unhurt. For
two miles, the elephants scattered, singly, in pairs and in
threes, and it was more than two hours later — 4:30 p.m. —
before the last was rounded up by the frantically laboring circus
hands. They roared through fences knocking them down indiscriminately, and one bull tore off the porch of a small house. Letter boxes in the rural route areas also went down, among them the box of Louis H. School at State Park and one of
his neighbors. Across
the Gonzales-Shiner Highway, the herd flew, some of them being
captured later against the brick walls of the Gonzales Cotton
Mill. One
pair suddenly smashed out of the brush land into the Shiner Road
just as a tourist car, bearing Indiana plates and containing a
middle-aged couple, drove along. The
goggle-eyed man at the wheel nearly cracked up when he saw the
elephants charging in his direction. He drove into a ditch and the
elephants passed by. Later, when he was able to regain the
highway, the tourist sped into town screaming that the elephants
were after him. It
was the first word in Gonzales that the elephants were on
stampede. But the tourist fled the city.
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