The Day They Hung the Elephant

Book excerpt: There is no doubt that in 1916 a five-ton circus elephant was lynched from a 100-ton Clinchfield railroad crane car in the little town of Erwin, Tennessee. The details of the execution and the tragic events leading up to it, however, are clouded in nearly a century of oral tradition. From one retelling to the next, facts are distorted and embellished; legend, instead of truth, is often accepted as fact. This book is an attempt to bring together all the known facts about the hanging and to fill in with educated guesses the missing parts of the puzzle.