December 16, 2013 • 33 mins
In 1898, two male lions killed and ate dozens of people in Tsavo and shut down construction of the Uganda Railroad. Lt. Col. John H. Patterson, a civil engineer working on the project, made it his personal mission to stop the feline scourge.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry, I'm Tracy Wilson, and today's topic is when
I'm kind of crazy excited about because I love it. Yes,
and it's also one that people have asked us to
(00:22):
talk about. Yes, so it's like a double bonus at
that point. Uh. You may have heard some about this sale.
But we're actually gonna do two parts. One is what
actually happened when all of this was going on, and
then we're going to do a second part about modern science, uh,
kind of analyzing this historical event and what we're talking
about today. It's um, there are two famous lions called
(00:45):
the Ghost in the Darkness. There have been movies made
about them, uh several actually, and they were a pair
of lions that killed and eight dozens of people in Tsavo.
But what you may not know is that the lions
in that region in Tsavo, uh in Africa, continue to
attack humans and that there are actually a lot of
question marks that have come up through the years about
(01:07):
the genetics of these lions, their behaviors, their adaptations to
their environments and as I said, because there is both
this fascinating story of this particular event that is kind
of considered a mythic killings free and a lot of
interesting science about what may have caused this kind of
behavior and and other subsequent things that have happened since then. Uh,
(01:28):
this one is a two parter, So today is the
event and then next time will be science about it.
There's so much science about it. There's a lot of science.
I actually had had to edit out a good bit
of the science just to keep it to two episodes,
because we could have gone on easily for three and
possibly more because there have been some really good research
projects around it. So first we're going to start uh
(01:49):
in Tavo. So the very name Tavo is kind of
ominous in the Kamba language, which is also called Kikamba,
which is a narrow band language. It actually means place
of slaughter, and it got this name from an ancient
battle that happened there between two tribes, the Massai and
the Acamba. And Tsavo is just a little bit smaller
(02:13):
for visual reference than the state of Massachusetts. It covers
about twenty square kilometers and it sits in what is
today southeastern Kenya and its position is about a hundred
and eighty kilometers northwest of Mombasa, and it sits at
the center of what's now known as the Greater Tsavo Ecosystem,
which covers about forty thousand square kilometers and it consists
(02:34):
of multiple national parks and reserves as well as ranch lands.
The railway route that was built through Tsavo followed a
footpath that had been used by slave caravans for hundreds
of years to transport things from the African interior out
to the coast. And the reason that we want to
talk about the railroad route because that's really where all
(02:55):
of this started being documented and happening. Uh In the
late eight nine and these the British East Africa Company
started construction of a railway that would join Mombassada Lake
Victoria along Africa's eastern seaboard, and it was going to
be called the Uganda Railway. But because there were just
constant struggles going on with the construction of it and
(03:16):
the company encountered one problem after another, some people started
calling the project the Lunatic Express. It sort of speaks
for itself. At that point, a lot of the workers
who were hired for the construction had to be recruited
from India because locals in the area were reluctant to
come on board. Yeah, so that was one of the
big challenges that they had. Another is that living conditions
(03:39):
were really not very good for the workers. The water
was unclean, the workers often had dysenterry, they would have fleas,
they would have scurvy, they would have, you know, really
horrific bouts of diarrhea that they had to survive through
where they were risking um being completely depleted of their fluids.
And they also lost so many animals that were part
(04:00):
of the work process. UH in eighteen ninety seven, and
if you look at the veterinary records for the area
and for the company, all sixty three of the company's
camels died, one of their three hundred and fifty mules died,
five hundred and seventy nine of their six hundred and
thirty nine head of cattle died, and all but thirty
(04:22):
six of their eight hundred donkeys that they started with died.
So the animals were dropping in an alarming rate, and
the humans were getting sick pretty consistently well. And if
you look back at the time period when this was happening.
Those animals were crucial to the construction process. I mean,
it would have been an inconvenient to lose the primary
food source, but yeah, they couldn't. They were hauling things.
(04:45):
They were right. They were part of a construction company,
yes they were. They were not simply like herd animals
being used to eat, although that also starvation is a problem.
So over of the decade that it took to complete
this project, the railway ended up costing eight million dollars
to build, and that was four times more than the
(05:06):
initial budget, and for the sake of comparison, that is
more than five hundred million dollars today, which is a
huge amount of money. Although part of me goes bigger, Yeah,
jaded I am by huge construction projects. Um. And then
a gentleman enters the picture. Who's sort of central to
this whole story, and that's British Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson,
(05:30):
and he was a civil engineer. He arrived at the
harbor of Mombassa on March one and his assignment primarily
was to head up the building of the permanent stonework
and the embankments that we're going to be part of
this railroad route. So at first he was pretty pleased
with the task at hand and happy in his work.
But things shifted pretty quickly, and this is what he
(05:52):
wrote from a passage into his book, The man Eaters
of Tsavo. Unfortunately, this happy state of affairs did not
continue for long, and our work was soon interrupted in
a rude and startling manner. To most voracious and insatiable
man eating lions appeared on the scene and for over
nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway and
(06:14):
all those connected with it in the vicinity of Tsavo.
This culminated in a perfect reign of terror in December,
when they actually succeeded in bringing the railway works to
a complete standstill for about three weeks. At first, they
were not always successful in their efforts to carry off
a victim, but as time went on they stopped at
(06:35):
nothing and indeed braved any danger in order to obtain
their favorite food. Their methods then became so uncanny, and
their man stalking so well timed and so certain of success,
that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real
animals at all, but devils in lions shape. Which is
(06:56):
how they get the name the ghost in the Darkness
because people really do believe they might be spirit and
the physical animals. Yeah, if you if you have heard
the recent stuff, you should know episode on Where Wolf.
Pretty Much every culture that has any kind of big
carnivore also has some kind of mythology about about people
becoming that thing in a demonic kind of way. So
it's not totally surprising that that these became to be
(07:19):
thought of as some kind of supernatural Yeah. Uh. And
it really happened very quickly because it was just a
few days after his arrival that Patterson was first informed
that two lions had been spotted nearby, and not long
after that, two of the Indian workmen vanished, allegedly carried
out of their tents in the night by lions. So
(07:41):
at first Patterson dismissed this lion story, and he thought
that the men had maybe been killed by some of
their co workers and some kind of murder slash, theft
and incident. But when a third man vanished into the night,
there were paw prints at the scene and witnesses convinced
him that this really is the work of felines. Yeah,
(08:02):
and it was. He kind of mentioned in the book,
the third man was one that he knew and that
was very well respected and very well loved by everyone,
So that also helped give a little bit of gredence
to the idea that it was not just a murder
over like a snag and somebody's paid a they There
really was something much bigger going on, and Patterson immediately
set to tracking the lion responsible. Uh He was also
(08:25):
joined by a Captain Haslum who was in Tsavo at
the time, and they followed the bloody trail left by
this third vanishing and they eventually happened upon a scene
that Patterson describes in his account as the most gruesome
he has ever seen. Uh So, the victim's head was
there intact, and it was adjacent to the rest of
(08:46):
his remains, most of which had been consumed, so there
were some bones left, but the head completely intact. And
this is also when Patterson became aware that there were
actually two lions and not just one, because he did
find two distinct sets of paw prints. So he set
up a post in a tree above the large tent
(09:06):
that was being shared by multiple co workers in case
the lions came back. That night, and they heard roars
approaching and then halting, and as the night wore on, Uh,
cries were heard from a camp about half a mile
away where the lions had struck another tent. Yeah, they
did not come back to that same tent, as he
had sort of hoped so that he could kill them.
(09:28):
They instead went somewhere else because they're wiley. According to Patterson,
the lions were in fact smart enough to hit different
camps each night, so it made predicting their attacks really difficult.
So if you can imagine the construction, it's going on
along several miles at a time, and then it slowly
moves forward as any railway at the time. We've talked
about that happening here in the US as the railway
(09:50):
boom was happening. Uh. And so there would be camps
sort of spread out by half a mile or show
between them, and the lions would just be hitting different
ones each night. Uh. And this practice of theirs to
be smart enough and wildy enough to kind of choose
different locations each evening also fed the rumors among the
men that the lions were supernatural because they were clearly
(10:11):
too cunning to be normal beasts. There were also a
number of failed attacks during this time, including one incident
which Patterson describes as rather comical, intention breaking for the men.
A trader from India riding his donkey down the road
at night was attacked by a lion on the road,
but the lion became entangled in the ropes that were
(10:32):
holding all the all of the traders of wares and
packs in place, and the clattering startled the animal and
since it running away, and I you and I both
have cats. It's reminding me of the time that one
of mine got entangled in a shopping bag and and
it was terrifying for her. I have had the same
and it is they just and it's like, you know,
(10:54):
people always say, if you're trying to train a cat
to do not do a thing, do you shake a
tin can full of penny that will scare them away
for the thing they were doing. And it works on
giant wildcats as well. Uh Patterson also recounts an instance
where the lions jumped onto a group tent and they
actually dragged off a large bag of rice, presumably, he theorizes,
(11:17):
thinking that it was a human, and they found the
bag abandoned nearby. The next morning, so that was also
one of the ones that he kind of frames is
a more comedic event in the midst of all of
this tension that was going on, because they were constantly
in fear that the lions were coming. Yeah, and it
reminds me of a little less humorous thing, which is
like when the shark bites the person on the surfboard
(11:41):
and thin goes, oh wait, that's not a seal. So
the person is injured, but the shark has realized that
it made an error. So to repel these attacks, Patterson
started building all kinds of fences or boma around the tents,
but he admitted that there was still this constant fear
that all line would just leap over them at any moment,
(12:03):
and so he got into the habit of always having
a rifle handy. There was also a string of lion sightings,
and sometimes witnesses described them as very obviously stalking some
of the men. During one overnight watch in which they
were set up in a wagon, Patterson and one of
his colleagues were startled by the one of the lions
(12:24):
actually springing at them and both fired their weapons, although
they the cat ran away, so they it was clearly
not a killing shot, but in the morning they could
only find one of the bullets, and Patterson believed that
his had actually hit the mark. So this seems to
have maybe scared the lions somewhat because their attacks did
(12:44):
stop for a little bit, although they continued to attack
other locations, just not quite as often. This gap in
lion attacks in the book is filled with Patterson describing
his relations with the workmen, keeping the peace, steering argument
outsmarting the lazy people, that kind of thing. Uh. And
(13:05):
during this time he also devised a plan for a
trap because he felt that they could not presume that
the lions were not coming back, uh, and he describes
it this way. I accordingly set to work at once,
and in short time managed to make a sufficiently strong
trap out of wooden sleepers, tram rails, pieces of telegraph wire,
and a length of heavy chain. It was divided into
(13:27):
two compartments, one for the men and one for the lion.
A sliding door at one end admitted the former, and
once inside this compartment they were perfectly safe, as between
them and the lion if he entered the other ran
a cross wall of iron rails only three inches apart
and embedded both top and bottom in heavy wooden sleepers.
The door, which was to admit the lion, was of
(13:49):
course at the opposite end of the structure, but otherwise
the whole thing was very much on the principle of
the ordinary rat trap, except that it was not necessary
for the lion to seize the bait in order to
send the door or clattering down. So he had really decided,
and was very public about this, that he was going
to end the scourge of these lions. So this trap
was his sort of engineering mind, finding one way to
(14:12):
address it. Not everybody was on board with this idea,
though if they were not, he went on to say,
the wise acres to whom I showed my invention were
generally of the opinion that the man eaters would be
too cunning to walk into my parlor. But as will
be seen later, their predictions proved false. For the first
few nights, I baited the trap myself, but nothing happened
(14:33):
except that I had a very sleepless and uncomfortable time
and was badly bitten by mosquitoes. So initially it seemed
like his um the wise acres to whom he revers
were correct and that the lions were not going to
be lured into that trap. Yes, I also want to
caution him about how he's gonna get malaria if he
does that. When you're possibly going to be eaten by
(14:53):
a lion, I think malaria falls down the list of
things you're worried about. With that note, do you want
to pause for a moment and take a word from
our sponsor? That so a news flash to no one.
The holidays are almost here, which for me is uh
a stressful time because I don't get any extra time
as a gift. I wish I could uh. And often
(15:14):
the thing that really sends me over the edge of
stress is realizing that I have parcels that I have
to mail because I think about the time that I'm
going to lose racing to the post office and trying
to battle traffic and trying to park and hopefully not
drop my package that I walked from the vehicle to
the post office, which has happened many times. Uh. And
I don't want to deal with the crabby people that
(15:35):
are also as stressed as me, and possibly more so so.
Instead Stamps dot Com. With stamps dot Com, you can
avoid all of those hassles of going to the post
office during the holidays, and everything you would do at
the post office you can do right at your desk
without having to deal with crabbiness or stress. You can
buy in print officially US posted using your own computer
and printer, and you can print postage for any letter
(15:56):
package right at the moment you need it and just
hand it off to your delightful man carrier and you
will be nicer to them, which makes them happier to
Its super easy and convenient. Right now, you can take
advantage of a special offer when you use our promo
code which is STUFF, and that entitles you to a
no risk trial plus a bonus offer, and that includes
a digital scale for perfect measurement of how much post
(16:18):
did you need? End up to fifty five dollars worth
of free postage. So don't wait. Go to stamps dot
com and before you do anything else, click on the
microphone at the top of the homepage and just type
in stuff and that offers all yours that's stamps dot
com and enter stuff. So now back to the lions. So,
while the attacks had dissipated in most areas and even
(16:38):
pretty much ceased near Patterson's own group. Uh, the men
had become more relaxed than their behaviors. You can understand,
the impending dooms seemed left impending, so they all got
a little more chill about things. But the column was
broken one night when the lions broke through a boma
that was protecting the sleeping quarters and carried off one
of the men. And this time, instead of what they
(17:02):
had done previously where they dragged their prey far away
to eat, the cats just kind of dropped the body
about thirty yards from the tent where they had struck
and just started eating there. Shots were fired at them
as this grizzly scene played out, and you know, men
were witnessing this and it was very horrifying, but they
didn't manage to hit the cats, and moreover, they didn't
(17:22):
even scare them. They those lions just sat there and
had their meal. Like there's just so much irritating noise,
but I'm really hungry, which is really brazen. It is
very brazen, and I cannot imagine how horrifying it must
have been to watch for the men who were attempting
(17:43):
to fire at them. So Patterson asked that they not
bury the victim right away. He was hoping that the
remains would lure the lions back the following night, but
instead they did what they had been doing before, and
they struck a different camp, following the same pattern of
consuming the victim pretty close to the camp site. Yes,
so they had at this time altered their behavior where
(18:03):
they didn't even bother to range away to eat uh.
Patterson's account notes a pretty clear change uh and the
progression of this brazenness and the lion's behavior as events continued,
and in one excerpt pieces the following I have a
very vivid recollection in one particular night, when the brute
sees a man from the railway station and brought him
(18:24):
close to my camp to devour. I could plainly hear
them crunching the bones, and the sound of their dreadful
purring filled the air and rang in my ears for
days afterwards. So he describes kind of being in his
tent and knowing that even if he goes out and fires,
he's not going to scare them away, and will only risk,
you know, potentially inviting their ire and just having to
listen to them eat a man, which is will make
(18:48):
your spine wiggle in ways it's not supposed to do
a little bit. It's very chilling. Yeah. Well, and the
the part of us that naturally wants to anthropomorphize animals
all the time kind of imagines that they're doing it
on purpose at this point, just just to be jerked.
But we don't know. No, we don't know, and that's
that's a human behavior ascribed to an animal at this point.
(19:11):
So before this point, one of the lions would do
most of the attacking and the other one would wait
out in the bush. But at this point their tactics
had really changed. They would both enter the camp at
the same time. They would each sees a victim, So
men were being carried off in twos. Yeah. Whereas prior
they would hit like one camp and then another camp
a lit always away theoretically so that they would each
(19:34):
have a kill. They just started going in at the
same time and kind of streamlining their own process. H
And as the attacks increased and the lions behaved with
greater and greater confidence, it really started to take its
toll on the workman, as you can easily imagine. So
this had started in March, and on December one of
that year, the men actually approached Patterson as a group,
(19:56):
and they told him they were not working anymore. They
had agreed to come to Tsavo to work for the
government and build a railroad, not to become lion food.
Let's talk about how I'm on the side of labor
in this dispute. Oh, for sure, I mean you can't.
And he doesn't fault them at all. No. Uh, I
think anybody that's reasonable could step back and go, Yeah,
I wouldn't work there either. That's a horrifying and terrifying
(20:19):
situation to be in. So just before this strike, Paterson
had contacted Mr Whitehead, who was the district officer, to
come and assist with taking down these two lions, which
at this point Patterson had vowed to kill. Whitehead's welcoming
party turned out to be feline. He and his man
servant were attacked as they approached the camp and his
(20:41):
back was torn open by a claw and his man
servant was killed. Yeah. They actually thought he had missed
a train because he didn't show up, but he had
just gotten there very late, and he foolishly tried to
approach the camp in the darkness, and the lions obviously
were stalking him. Uh. And so is a consequence of
having been attacked and knowing this was in fact a
very real situation Asian. With Whitehead's arrival, a very concerted
(21:03):
effort went underway to slay these lions and get the
Mammoth railway project, which if you look at it from
a business perspective, was already behind schedule and very expensive,
back on track. A superintendent of police and several other
officials arrived from the coast, and Patterson's lion trap, despite
all of the mocking, was put to use. Uh as
the cabal of men sort of waited for the next
(21:25):
attack like they felt like they knew it was coming,
they just didn't know when. So that night a lion
did enter the trap, but the outcome was not what
Patterson had hoped for. Finding themselves at such close proximity
to a man eating lion, the men who were the
bait for the trap reacted by freezing rather than acting.
Only after an officer called out to them did they
(21:47):
kind of snap out of their collective days and start
to fire. And here is how Patterson described that. Then
when at last they did begin to fire, they fired
with a vengeance. Anywhere Anyhow, Whitehead and I were right
angles to the direction in which they should have shot,
and yet their bullets came whizzing all around us. Together
(22:08):
they fired over a score of shots, and in the
end succeeded only in blowing away one of the bars
of the door, thus allowing our prize to make good
his escape. How they failed to kill him several times
over is and always will be a complete mystery to me,
as they could have put the muzzles of their rifles
absolutely touching his body. There was indeed some blood scattered
(22:29):
about the trap, but it was small consolation to know
that the brute whose capture and death seemed so certain,
had only been slightly wounded. And the men did track
the lions, and while they heard them making noise periodically,
they never actually made contact with them. So even in
their injured state, they were able to elude these trackers,
(22:51):
which only gave their mythos as being supernatural greater um fuel.
A few days later, on the summer ninth, the lions
were spotted nearby eating a donkey they had snatched in
a failed attempt to take the person who owned that animal.
Patterson felt that this would be his chance to catch
the cats unawares and finally end all of this carnage.
(23:14):
He thought he was going to sneak up on them
while they were busy eating uh. And the hunt had
some challenges, because that's just how things go with this
particular project and lion situation. When they were first approaching
the pair of lions in the bush, Patterson's guide made
a misstep and snapped a twig. It's a classic film scenario, uh,
(23:35):
and that alerted the animals, and Patterson then quickly organized.
He retreated and organized what men were available to grab
every noise making item they could find in the camp
and form a semicircle behind the area where the lions
were so that they could flush them towards Patterson, who
was waiting with a heavy rifle. And this seemed to work.
One of the lions was driven right into Patterson's sites
(23:57):
until uh, the full which had been lent to him
by the Superintendent of police, failed to fire properly. It
was like every time they got so close and it
seemed so obvious that they should be the victors in
this situation, some weird or cookie thing would happen and
the lions and once again, well it's it's not surprising
(24:18):
that this whole thing has been made into a lot
of movies because it's a whole horrifying, suspenseful event. But
it's like the They didn't even have to add in
the bad screenwriting to add more at tension to it,
because it was all actually happening naturally in the real story. Yeah,
there was a second shot that he was able to
get off, and he did hit the lion, but the
cat was able to get away. Later that night, Patterson
(24:41):
sat in a tree on a watch and he realized
that one of the lions was stalking him. So he
waited patiently for the cat to get closer and closer
until he felt like he had a good shot, and
he took it. He heard a roar and thrashing, and
he fired. He fired several more times into the bush
where the lion was. Eventually there was a stillness and
(25:01):
the first lion was finally dead. And when they finally
retrieved the carcass, it was, according to Patterson's account, nine
ft eight inches in length and three ft nine inches high,
and it took eight men to carry it back to camp.
Not long after that, Patterson was able to successfully shoot
and wound the other lion, but in spite of it
(25:23):
having been obviously wounded, he couldn't find it the next
morning that he really thought he was going to find
it deceased somewhere in the bush, and he didn't, which
was shocking, And in fact, they did not see it
for ten more days uh then on December, so at
this point it's been almost four weeks since the men quit. Uh.
The lion attempted another attack. When Patterson was alerted to this,
(25:46):
he fired shots in the air at first hopening hoping
to frighten it off because it had caught them by surprise,
and he mostly just wanted to not lose any more people.
Uh And it was too dark for him to see clearly,
so he didn't really think his odds were great to
kill it them, but the lion did indeed treat The
next night, Patterson and an assistant took up watching a tree,
and they found themselves being stalked. So similar to the
(26:09):
way the first lion lost its life trying to stalk
Patterson up a tree, the second line was fired upon
when he got within twenty yards, and they fired multiple shots,
but they had to wait for daylight before they could
follow the wounded animal, and they finally encountered him in
the thicket and he was growling. But when Patterson reached
out for his man servant to hand him his gun,
(26:30):
he discovered that the man had actually run away in fear.
So even though the lion was wounded, it was clearly
still very frightening and seemed to present a threat. Uh
So Patterson followed the man that had run because at
that point he was unarmed in front of an angry
and hurt lion and didn't know what it would do.
And the lion did indeed chase him, but it had
a broken leg from one of the shots that had
(26:53):
hit it, and the men were able to take refuge
once again up the tree. Trees are very vital to
their safety in the story. As the lion turned to
limp away, Patterson fired the killing shot, finally putting an
end to what he had referred to as the reign
of terror, and things were able to get back under
way again. The railway was completed in nineteen o one.
(27:15):
In in nineteen o seven, Paterson published his account of
the incidents. He kept the skulls and he used their
skins as rugs, and in n s he sold all
of this to the Field Museum in Chicago for five
thousand dollars. You can still see them on display there,
although at this point there are a lot of replacement
parts in the in the taxidermy. Yeah there. Uh. Their
(27:38):
skins were you know, used as rugs, so they were
badly damaged and there was a lot of restauration that
had to happen, and they really only had the skins
in the skulls, so the rest is uh sculpted And
they have an incredible taxidermy team at the Fields, and
it's really quite an impressive piece of work. They're so skilled.
And I wanted to mention that one of the things
that really shines through in Patters since writing is how much,
(28:02):
despite all of these lion difficulties, and possibly even partially
because of them, uh, he seemed to really love his
job and his time and Tsavo. Uh. He speaks so
wistfully of eating lunches in the wild even when these
lions were out there, and the joy of finding solutions
to engineering challenges while the building of the Tsavo Bridge
(28:22):
was underway as part of the railway. It's a really
good read. I highly recommend it. Um It's it's just
he has a great way with language and telling his story,
and it has led some people to be like, he's
a really good storyteller. So we don't know how much
has been embellished, although there are enough different accounts that
(28:43):
we know most of this is, in fact the way
it went down pretty substantiated. Um. But that is the
story of the the pair of lions that murdered dozens
of men. And we'll get into just how many in
the next one, because that has been a bone of contention. Uh.
It's such a scary and fascinating story, and you kind
(29:05):
of can't help but have respect for these animals because
they really were quite cunning and ah, as much as
what they were doing was horrifying, it's a little bit
of an eye opener. I think people use the term
dumb animal and they don't really realize, Yeah, no, they're
problem solvers. They can figure things out, and they outwitted
a lot of men who were bright, gentlemen who wanted
(29:30):
nothing more to kill them, and they couldn't for quite
some time. Nine months it took to kill these two
lions that were hitting this same stretch of land over
and over. Yeah. Well, and today we mostly talked about
the like the the downsides of development in terms of
like eating up animal habitat and causing extinctions and things
and a lack of biodiversity and stuff like that, but
(29:52):
not as much attention today is paid to the fact
of when humans start moving into an area that animals
have mostly been running the show in the the animals
themselves can also be a threat with the people. Like
it's not just a matter of you know, we're going
to have fewer species in the world because we're eating
up all the habitats. There's also they And then the
(30:15):
reason that we have things like shark attacks and bear
attacks and line attacks is that there are people in
places where these animals used to be the ones running
the show. So next time we're going to talk more
about the science and analysis of why they were doing this,
how they were doing it, and you know what was
(30:35):
actually going on from a scientific angle, which is super cool.
I love the behavioral stuff. Do you have some listener
mail for us before we go? I do. This one
is from Kirk and he says, Hi, Hollie and Tracy. Coincidentally,
I was listening to your Heshian podcast yesterday while landing
at Frankfurt Airport. I could see hess from my seat.
That's so cool. I'm a descendant of a Hessian soldier,
(30:57):
Johann Bernard shah Has, who surrendered to George Washington after
the Battle of Yorktown. I've spent my life explaining the
difference between mercenaries and adjunct armies f y I. After
the war, Hessians were actually encouraged to defect and settle
here rather than going back to hess. My ancestor married
a nice Pennsylvania Dutch girl and moved to Virginia. Uh.
(31:17):
And then he references some research uh that was done
by a fellow Heshian descendant. But Kirk, if you're listening,
you didn't include the link, Please do it because I
would love to read it. But it's an interesting thing
one to have a direct link. We always love those.
If we talked about it all the time, and to
uh the idea that they were kind of encouraged, like
just stay here, it's going to be easier than chipping
you back. Yeah. We got several, like several notes and
(31:38):
Facebook comments and things from people who whose immediate response
was my ancestor was one of these soldiers. Uh. And
we've we've had some who were encouraged to stay after
the fighting was over, and some who pretty much got
here and went, hey, okay, let's desert now instead of
fighting and go start a nice farm somewhere. I can
(32:00):
give the appeal. Oh me too? Oh yeah? Uh? Kirk
roach us on Facebook. If you would like to do
the same, you can do so at Facebook dot com
slash history class Stuff. You can connect with us on
Twitter at Misston History, on Tumbler at Misston History dot
tumbler dot com, and you can email us at History
Podcasts at Discovery dot com. We are also on pintriest
anning away many things. There are some images of actions,
(32:23):
and there john the uniforms that we talked about in
the podcast up there now. If you would like to
learn more about what we talked about today, you can
go to our website and type in the words man
eating lion and the article that will pop up first
is is there such a thing as a man eating lion?
The short version is yes, but there's also some really
cool interesting research in that article that talks about why
(32:45):
there is. And if you would learn about almost anything
else you can think of, you can do that at
our website, which is how Stuffworks dot Com for laur
on this and thousands of other topics because it has
to have works dot com. Audible dot com is the
(33:11):
leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
Audible has more than one thousand titles to choose from
to be downloaded to your iPod or MP three player.
Go to audible podcast dot com slash history to get
a free audio book download of your choice when you
sign up today.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry, I'm Tracy Wilson, and today's topic is when
I'm kind of crazy excited about because I love it. Yes,
and it's also one that people have asked us to
(00:22):
talk about. Yes, so it's like a double bonus at
that point. Uh. You may have heard some about this sale.
But we're actually gonna do two parts. One is what
actually happened when all of this was going on, and
then we're going to do a second part about modern science, uh,
kind of analyzing this historical event and what we're talking
about today. It's um, there are two famous lions called
(00:45):
the Ghost in the Darkness. There have been movies made
about them, uh several actually, and they were a pair
of lions that killed and eight dozens of people in Tsavo.
But what you may not know is that the lions
in that region in Tsavo, uh in Africa, continue to
attack humans and that there are actually a lot of
question marks that have come up through the years about
(01:07):
the genetics of these lions, their behaviors, their adaptations to
their environments and as I said, because there is both
this fascinating story of this particular event that is kind
of considered a mythic killings free and a lot of
interesting science about what may have caused this kind of
behavior and and other subsequent things that have happened since then. Uh,
(01:28):
this one is a two parter, So today is the
event and then next time will be science about it.
There's so much science about it. There's a lot of science.
I actually had had to edit out a good bit
of the science just to keep it to two episodes,
because we could have gone on easily for three and
possibly more because there have been some really good research
projects around it. So first we're going to start uh
(01:49):
in Tavo. So the very name Tavo is kind of
ominous in the Kamba language, which is also called Kikamba,
which is a narrow band language. It actually means place
of slaughter, and it got this name from an ancient
battle that happened there between two tribes, the Massai and
the Acamba. And Tsavo is just a little bit smaller
(02:13):
for visual reference than the state of Massachusetts. It covers
about twenty square kilometers and it sits in what is
today southeastern Kenya and its position is about a hundred
and eighty kilometers northwest of Mombasa, and it sits at
the center of what's now known as the Greater Tsavo Ecosystem,
which covers about forty thousand square kilometers and it consists
(02:34):
of multiple national parks and reserves as well as ranch lands.
The railway route that was built through Tsavo followed a
footpath that had been used by slave caravans for hundreds
of years to transport things from the African interior out
to the coast. And the reason that we want to
talk about the railroad route because that's really where all
(02:55):
of this started being documented and happening. Uh In the
late eight nine and these the British East Africa Company
started construction of a railway that would join Mombassada Lake
Victoria along Africa's eastern seaboard, and it was going to
be called the Uganda Railway. But because there were just
constant struggles going on with the construction of it and
(03:16):
the company encountered one problem after another, some people started
calling the project the Lunatic Express. It sort of speaks
for itself. At that point, a lot of the workers
who were hired for the construction had to be recruited
from India because locals in the area were reluctant to
come on board. Yeah, so that was one of the
big challenges that they had. Another is that living conditions
(03:39):
were really not very good for the workers. The water
was unclean, the workers often had dysenterry, they would have fleas,
they would have scurvy, they would have, you know, really
horrific bouts of diarrhea that they had to survive through
where they were risking um being completely depleted of their fluids.
And they also lost so many animals that were part
(04:00):
of the work process. UH in eighteen ninety seven, and
if you look at the veterinary records for the area
and for the company, all sixty three of the company's
camels died, one of their three hundred and fifty mules died,
five hundred and seventy nine of their six hundred and
thirty nine head of cattle died, and all but thirty
(04:22):
six of their eight hundred donkeys that they started with died.
So the animals were dropping in an alarming rate, and
the humans were getting sick pretty consistently well. And if
you look back at the time period when this was happening.
Those animals were crucial to the construction process. I mean,
it would have been an inconvenient to lose the primary
food source, but yeah, they couldn't. They were hauling things.
(04:45):
They were right. They were part of a construction company,
yes they were. They were not simply like herd animals
being used to eat, although that also starvation is a problem.
So over of the decade that it took to complete
this project, the railway ended up costing eight million dollars
to build, and that was four times more than the
(05:06):
initial budget, and for the sake of comparison, that is
more than five hundred million dollars today, which is a
huge amount of money. Although part of me goes bigger, Yeah,
jaded I am by huge construction projects. Um. And then
a gentleman enters the picture. Who's sort of central to
this whole story, and that's British Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson,
(05:30):
and he was a civil engineer. He arrived at the
harbor of Mombassa on March one and his assignment primarily
was to head up the building of the permanent stonework
and the embankments that we're going to be part of
this railroad route. So at first he was pretty pleased
with the task at hand and happy in his work.
But things shifted pretty quickly, and this is what he
(05:52):
wrote from a passage into his book, The man Eaters
of Tsavo. Unfortunately, this happy state of affairs did not
continue for long, and our work was soon interrupted in
a rude and startling manner. To most voracious and insatiable
man eating lions appeared on the scene and for over
nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway and
(06:14):
all those connected with it in the vicinity of Tsavo.
This culminated in a perfect reign of terror in December,
when they actually succeeded in bringing the railway works to
a complete standstill for about three weeks. At first, they
were not always successful in their efforts to carry off
a victim, but as time went on they stopped at
(06:35):
nothing and indeed braved any danger in order to obtain
their favorite food. Their methods then became so uncanny, and
their man stalking so well timed and so certain of success,
that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real
animals at all, but devils in lions shape. Which is
(06:56):
how they get the name the ghost in the Darkness
because people really do believe they might be spirit and
the physical animals. Yeah, if you if you have heard
the recent stuff, you should know episode on Where Wolf.
Pretty Much every culture that has any kind of big
carnivore also has some kind of mythology about about people
becoming that thing in a demonic kind of way. So
it's not totally surprising that that these became to be
(07:19):
thought of as some kind of supernatural Yeah. Uh. And
it really happened very quickly because it was just a
few days after his arrival that Patterson was first informed
that two lions had been spotted nearby, and not long
after that, two of the Indian workmen vanished, allegedly carried
out of their tents in the night by lions. So
(07:41):
at first Patterson dismissed this lion story, and he thought
that the men had maybe been killed by some of
their co workers and some kind of murder slash, theft
and incident. But when a third man vanished into the night,
there were paw prints at the scene and witnesses convinced
him that this really is the work of felines. Yeah,
(08:02):
and it was. He kind of mentioned in the book,
the third man was one that he knew and that
was very well respected and very well loved by everyone,
So that also helped give a little bit of gredence
to the idea that it was not just a murder
over like a snag and somebody's paid a they There
really was something much bigger going on, and Patterson immediately
set to tracking the lion responsible. Uh He was also
(08:25):
joined by a Captain Haslum who was in Tsavo at
the time, and they followed the bloody trail left by
this third vanishing and they eventually happened upon a scene
that Patterson describes in his account as the most gruesome
he has ever seen. Uh So, the victim's head was
there intact, and it was adjacent to the rest of
(08:46):
his remains, most of which had been consumed, so there
were some bones left, but the head completely intact. And
this is also when Patterson became aware that there were
actually two lions and not just one, because he did
find two distinct sets of paw prints. So he set
up a post in a tree above the large tent
(09:06):
that was being shared by multiple co workers in case
the lions came back. That night, and they heard roars
approaching and then halting, and as the night wore on, Uh,
cries were heard from a camp about half a mile
away where the lions had struck another tent. Yeah, they
did not come back to that same tent, as he
had sort of hoped so that he could kill them.
(09:28):
They instead went somewhere else because they're wiley. According to Patterson,
the lions were in fact smart enough to hit different
camps each night, so it made predicting their attacks really difficult.
So if you can imagine the construction, it's going on
along several miles at a time, and then it slowly
moves forward as any railway at the time. We've talked
about that happening here in the US as the railway
(09:50):
boom was happening. Uh. And so there would be camps
sort of spread out by half a mile or show
between them, and the lions would just be hitting different
ones each night. Uh. And this practice of theirs to
be smart enough and wildy enough to kind of choose
different locations each evening also fed the rumors among the
men that the lions were supernatural because they were clearly
(10:11):
too cunning to be normal beasts. There were also a
number of failed attacks during this time, including one incident
which Patterson describes as rather comical, intention breaking for the men.
A trader from India riding his donkey down the road
at night was attacked by a lion on the road,
but the lion became entangled in the ropes that were
(10:32):
holding all the all of the traders of wares and
packs in place, and the clattering startled the animal and
since it running away, and I you and I both
have cats. It's reminding me of the time that one
of mine got entangled in a shopping bag and and
it was terrifying for her. I have had the same
and it is they just and it's like, you know,
(10:54):
people always say, if you're trying to train a cat
to do not do a thing, do you shake a
tin can full of penny that will scare them away
for the thing they were doing. And it works on
giant wildcats as well. Uh Patterson also recounts an instance
where the lions jumped onto a group tent and they
actually dragged off a large bag of rice, presumably, he theorizes,
(11:17):
thinking that it was a human, and they found the
bag abandoned nearby. The next morning, so that was also
one of the ones that he kind of frames is
a more comedic event in the midst of all of
this tension that was going on, because they were constantly
in fear that the lions were coming. Yeah, and it
reminds me of a little less humorous thing, which is
like when the shark bites the person on the surfboard
(11:41):
and thin goes, oh wait, that's not a seal. So
the person is injured, but the shark has realized that
it made an error. So to repel these attacks, Patterson
started building all kinds of fences or boma around the tents,
but he admitted that there was still this constant fear
that all line would just leap over them at any moment,
(12:03):
and so he got into the habit of always having
a rifle handy. There was also a string of lion sightings,
and sometimes witnesses described them as very obviously stalking some
of the men. During one overnight watch in which they
were set up in a wagon, Patterson and one of
his colleagues were startled by the one of the lions
(12:24):
actually springing at them and both fired their weapons, although
they the cat ran away, so they it was clearly
not a killing shot, but in the morning they could
only find one of the bullets, and Patterson believed that
his had actually hit the mark. So this seems to
have maybe scared the lions somewhat because their attacks did
(12:44):
stop for a little bit, although they continued to attack
other locations, just not quite as often. This gap in
lion attacks in the book is filled with Patterson describing
his relations with the workmen, keeping the peace, steering argument
outsmarting the lazy people, that kind of thing. Uh. And
(13:05):
during this time he also devised a plan for a
trap because he felt that they could not presume that
the lions were not coming back, uh, and he describes
it this way. I accordingly set to work at once,
and in short time managed to make a sufficiently strong
trap out of wooden sleepers, tram rails, pieces of telegraph wire,
and a length of heavy chain. It was divided into
(13:27):
two compartments, one for the men and one for the lion.
A sliding door at one end admitted the former, and
once inside this compartment they were perfectly safe, as between
them and the lion if he entered the other ran
a cross wall of iron rails only three inches apart
and embedded both top and bottom in heavy wooden sleepers.
The door, which was to admit the lion, was of
(13:49):
course at the opposite end of the structure, but otherwise
the whole thing was very much on the principle of
the ordinary rat trap, except that it was not necessary
for the lion to seize the bait in order to
send the door or clattering down. So he had really decided,
and was very public about this, that he was going
to end the scourge of these lions. So this trap
was his sort of engineering mind, finding one way to
(14:12):
address it. Not everybody was on board with this idea,
though if they were not, he went on to say,
the wise acres to whom I showed my invention were
generally of the opinion that the man eaters would be
too cunning to walk into my parlor. But as will
be seen later, their predictions proved false. For the first
few nights, I baited the trap myself, but nothing happened
(14:33):
except that I had a very sleepless and uncomfortable time
and was badly bitten by mosquitoes. So initially it seemed
like his um the wise acres to whom he revers
were correct and that the lions were not going to
be lured into that trap. Yes, I also want to
caution him about how he's gonna get malaria if he
does that. When you're possibly going to be eaten by
(14:53):
a lion, I think malaria falls down the list of
things you're worried about. With that note, do you want
to pause for a moment and take a word from
our sponsor? That so a news flash to no one.
The holidays are almost here, which for me is uh
a stressful time because I don't get any extra time
as a gift. I wish I could uh. And often
(15:14):
the thing that really sends me over the edge of
stress is realizing that I have parcels that I have
to mail because I think about the time that I'm
going to lose racing to the post office and trying
to battle traffic and trying to park and hopefully not
drop my package that I walked from the vehicle to
the post office, which has happened many times. Uh. And
I don't want to deal with the crabby people that
(15:35):
are also as stressed as me, and possibly more so so.
Instead Stamps dot Com. With stamps dot Com, you can
avoid all of those hassles of going to the post
office during the holidays, and everything you would do at
the post office you can do right at your desk
without having to deal with crabbiness or stress. You can
buy in print officially US posted using your own computer
and printer, and you can print postage for any letter
(15:56):
package right at the moment you need it and just
hand it off to your delightful man carrier and you
will be nicer to them, which makes them happier to
Its super easy and convenient. Right now, you can take
advantage of a special offer when you use our promo
code which is STUFF, and that entitles you to a
no risk trial plus a bonus offer, and that includes
a digital scale for perfect measurement of how much post
(16:18):
did you need? End up to fifty five dollars worth
of free postage. So don't wait. Go to stamps dot
com and before you do anything else, click on the
microphone at the top of the homepage and just type
in stuff and that offers all yours that's stamps dot
com and enter stuff. So now back to the lions. So,
while the attacks had dissipated in most areas and even
(16:38):
pretty much ceased near Patterson's own group. Uh, the men
had become more relaxed than their behaviors. You can understand,
the impending dooms seemed left impending, so they all got
a little more chill about things. But the column was
broken one night when the lions broke through a boma
that was protecting the sleeping quarters and carried off one
of the men. And this time, instead of what they
(17:02):
had done previously where they dragged their prey far away
to eat, the cats just kind of dropped the body
about thirty yards from the tent where they had struck
and just started eating there. Shots were fired at them
as this grizzly scene played out, and you know, men
were witnessing this and it was very horrifying, but they
didn't manage to hit the cats, and moreover, they didn't
(17:22):
even scare them. They those lions just sat there and
had their meal. Like there's just so much irritating noise,
but I'm really hungry, which is really brazen. It is
very brazen, and I cannot imagine how horrifying it must
have been to watch for the men who were attempting
(17:43):
to fire at them. So Patterson asked that they not
bury the victim right away. He was hoping that the
remains would lure the lions back the following night, but
instead they did what they had been doing before, and
they struck a different camp, following the same pattern of
consuming the victim pretty close to the camp site. Yes,
so they had at this time altered their behavior where
(18:03):
they didn't even bother to range away to eat uh.
Patterson's account notes a pretty clear change uh and the
progression of this brazenness and the lion's behavior as events continued,
and in one excerpt pieces the following I have a
very vivid recollection in one particular night, when the brute
sees a man from the railway station and brought him
(18:24):
close to my camp to devour. I could plainly hear
them crunching the bones, and the sound of their dreadful
purring filled the air and rang in my ears for
days afterwards. So he describes kind of being in his
tent and knowing that even if he goes out and fires,
he's not going to scare them away, and will only risk,
you know, potentially inviting their ire and just having to
listen to them eat a man, which is will make
(18:48):
your spine wiggle in ways it's not supposed to do
a little bit. It's very chilling. Yeah. Well, and the
the part of us that naturally wants to anthropomorphize animals
all the time kind of imagines that they're doing it
on purpose at this point, just just to be jerked.
But we don't know. No, we don't know, and that's
that's a human behavior ascribed to an animal at this point.
(19:11):
So before this point, one of the lions would do
most of the attacking and the other one would wait
out in the bush. But at this point their tactics
had really changed. They would both enter the camp at
the same time. They would each sees a victim, So
men were being carried off in twos. Yeah. Whereas prior
they would hit like one camp and then another camp
a lit always away theoretically so that they would each
(19:34):
have a kill. They just started going in at the
same time and kind of streamlining their own process. H
And as the attacks increased and the lions behaved with
greater and greater confidence, it really started to take its
toll on the workman, as you can easily imagine. So
this had started in March, and on December one of
that year, the men actually approached Patterson as a group,
(19:56):
and they told him they were not working anymore. They
had agreed to come to Tsavo to work for the
government and build a railroad, not to become lion food.
Let's talk about how I'm on the side of labor
in this dispute. Oh, for sure, I mean you can't.
And he doesn't fault them at all. No. Uh, I
think anybody that's reasonable could step back and go, Yeah,
I wouldn't work there either. That's a horrifying and terrifying
(20:19):
situation to be in. So just before this strike, Paterson
had contacted Mr Whitehead, who was the district officer, to
come and assist with taking down these two lions, which
at this point Patterson had vowed to kill. Whitehead's welcoming
party turned out to be feline. He and his man
servant were attacked as they approached the camp and his
(20:41):
back was torn open by a claw and his man
servant was killed. Yeah. They actually thought he had missed
a train because he didn't show up, but he had
just gotten there very late, and he foolishly tried to
approach the camp in the darkness, and the lions obviously
were stalking him. Uh. And so is a consequence of
having been attacked and knowing this was in fact a
very real situation Asian. With Whitehead's arrival, a very concerted
(21:03):
effort went underway to slay these lions and get the
Mammoth railway project, which if you look at it from
a business perspective, was already behind schedule and very expensive,
back on track. A superintendent of police and several other
officials arrived from the coast, and Patterson's lion trap, despite
all of the mocking, was put to use. Uh as
the cabal of men sort of waited for the next
(21:25):
attack like they felt like they knew it was coming,
they just didn't know when. So that night a lion
did enter the trap, but the outcome was not what
Patterson had hoped for. Finding themselves at such close proximity
to a man eating lion, the men who were the
bait for the trap reacted by freezing rather than acting.
Only after an officer called out to them did they
(21:47):
kind of snap out of their collective days and start
to fire. And here is how Patterson described that. Then
when at last they did begin to fire, they fired
with a vengeance. Anywhere Anyhow, Whitehead and I were right
angles to the direction in which they should have shot,
and yet their bullets came whizzing all around us. Together
(22:08):
they fired over a score of shots, and in the
end succeeded only in blowing away one of the bars
of the door, thus allowing our prize to make good
his escape. How they failed to kill him several times
over is and always will be a complete mystery to me,
as they could have put the muzzles of their rifles
absolutely touching his body. There was indeed some blood scattered
(22:29):
about the trap, but it was small consolation to know
that the brute whose capture and death seemed so certain,
had only been slightly wounded. And the men did track
the lions, and while they heard them making noise periodically,
they never actually made contact with them. So even in
their injured state, they were able to elude these trackers,
(22:51):
which only gave their mythos as being supernatural greater um fuel.
A few days later, on the summer ninth, the lions
were spotted nearby eating a donkey they had snatched in
a failed attempt to take the person who owned that animal.
Patterson felt that this would be his chance to catch
the cats unawares and finally end all of this carnage.
(23:14):
He thought he was going to sneak up on them
while they were busy eating uh. And the hunt had
some challenges, because that's just how things go with this
particular project and lion situation. When they were first approaching
the pair of lions in the bush, Patterson's guide made
a misstep and snapped a twig. It's a classic film scenario, uh,
(23:35):
and that alerted the animals, and Patterson then quickly organized.
He retreated and organized what men were available to grab
every noise making item they could find in the camp
and form a semicircle behind the area where the lions
were so that they could flush them towards Patterson, who
was waiting with a heavy rifle. And this seemed to work.
One of the lions was driven right into Patterson's sites
(23:57):
until uh, the full which had been lent to him
by the Superintendent of police, failed to fire properly. It
was like every time they got so close and it
seemed so obvious that they should be the victors in
this situation, some weird or cookie thing would happen and
the lions and once again, well it's it's not surprising
(24:18):
that this whole thing has been made into a lot
of movies because it's a whole horrifying, suspenseful event. But
it's like the They didn't even have to add in
the bad screenwriting to add more at tension to it,
because it was all actually happening naturally in the real story. Yeah,
there was a second shot that he was able to
get off, and he did hit the lion, but the
cat was able to get away. Later that night, Patterson
(24:41):
sat in a tree on a watch and he realized
that one of the lions was stalking him. So he
waited patiently for the cat to get closer and closer
until he felt like he had a good shot, and
he took it. He heard a roar and thrashing, and
he fired. He fired several more times into the bush
where the lion was. Eventually there was a stillness and
(25:01):
the first lion was finally dead. And when they finally
retrieved the carcass, it was, according to Patterson's account, nine
ft eight inches in length and three ft nine inches high,
and it took eight men to carry it back to camp.
Not long after that, Patterson was able to successfully shoot
and wound the other lion, but in spite of it
(25:23):
having been obviously wounded, he couldn't find it the next
morning that he really thought he was going to find
it deceased somewhere in the bush, and he didn't, which
was shocking, And in fact, they did not see it
for ten more days uh then on December, so at
this point it's been almost four weeks since the men quit. Uh.
The lion attempted another attack. When Patterson was alerted to this,
(25:46):
he fired shots in the air at first hopening hoping
to frighten it off because it had caught them by surprise,
and he mostly just wanted to not lose any more people.
Uh And it was too dark for him to see clearly,
so he didn't really think his odds were great to
kill it them, but the lion did indeed treat The
next night, Patterson and an assistant took up watching a tree,
and they found themselves being stalked. So similar to the
(26:09):
way the first lion lost its life trying to stalk
Patterson up a tree, the second line was fired upon
when he got within twenty yards, and they fired multiple shots,
but they had to wait for daylight before they could
follow the wounded animal, and they finally encountered him in
the thicket and he was growling. But when Patterson reached
out for his man servant to hand him his gun,
(26:30):
he discovered that the man had actually run away in fear.
So even though the lion was wounded, it was clearly
still very frightening and seemed to present a threat. Uh
So Patterson followed the man that had run because at
that point he was unarmed in front of an angry
and hurt lion and didn't know what it would do.
And the lion did indeed chase him, but it had
a broken leg from one of the shots that had
(26:53):
hit it, and the men were able to take refuge
once again up the tree. Trees are very vital to
their safety in the story. As the lion turned to
limp away, Patterson fired the killing shot, finally putting an
end to what he had referred to as the reign
of terror, and things were able to get back under
way again. The railway was completed in nineteen o one.
(27:15):
In in nineteen o seven, Paterson published his account of
the incidents. He kept the skulls and he used their
skins as rugs, and in n s he sold all
of this to the Field Museum in Chicago for five
thousand dollars. You can still see them on display there,
although at this point there are a lot of replacement
parts in the in the taxidermy. Yeah there. Uh. Their
(27:38):
skins were you know, used as rugs, so they were
badly damaged and there was a lot of restauration that
had to happen, and they really only had the skins
in the skulls, so the rest is uh sculpted And
they have an incredible taxidermy team at the Fields, and
it's really quite an impressive piece of work. They're so skilled.
And I wanted to mention that one of the things
that really shines through in Patters since writing is how much,
(28:02):
despite all of these lion difficulties, and possibly even partially
because of them, uh, he seemed to really love his
job and his time and Tsavo. Uh. He speaks so
wistfully of eating lunches in the wild even when these
lions were out there, and the joy of finding solutions
to engineering challenges while the building of the Tsavo Bridge
(28:22):
was underway as part of the railway. It's a really
good read. I highly recommend it. Um It's it's just
he has a great way with language and telling his story,
and it has led some people to be like, he's
a really good storyteller. So we don't know how much
has been embellished, although there are enough different accounts that
(28:43):
we know most of this is, in fact the way
it went down pretty substantiated. Um. But that is the
story of the the pair of lions that murdered dozens
of men. And we'll get into just how many in
the next one, because that has been a bone of contention. Uh.
It's such a scary and fascinating story, and you kind
(29:05):
of can't help but have respect for these animals because
they really were quite cunning and ah, as much as
what they were doing was horrifying, it's a little bit
of an eye opener. I think people use the term
dumb animal and they don't really realize, Yeah, no, they're
problem solvers. They can figure things out, and they outwitted
a lot of men who were bright, gentlemen who wanted
(29:30):
nothing more to kill them, and they couldn't for quite
some time. Nine months it took to kill these two
lions that were hitting this same stretch of land over
and over. Yeah. Well, and today we mostly talked about
the like the the downsides of development in terms of
like eating up animal habitat and causing extinctions and things
and a lack of biodiversity and stuff like that, but
(29:52):
not as much attention today is paid to the fact
of when humans start moving into an area that animals
have mostly been running the show in the the animals
themselves can also be a threat with the people. Like
it's not just a matter of you know, we're going
to have fewer species in the world because we're eating
up all the habitats. There's also they And then the
(30:15):
reason that we have things like shark attacks and bear
attacks and line attacks is that there are people in
places where these animals used to be the ones running
the show. So next time we're going to talk more
about the science and analysis of why they were doing this,
how they were doing it, and you know what was
(30:35):
actually going on from a scientific angle, which is super cool.
I love the behavioral stuff. Do you have some listener
mail for us before we go? I do. This one
is from Kirk and he says, Hi, Hollie and Tracy. Coincidentally,
I was listening to your Heshian podcast yesterday while landing
at Frankfurt Airport. I could see hess from my seat.
That's so cool. I'm a descendant of a Hessian soldier,
(30:57):
Johann Bernard shah Has, who surrendered to George Washington after
the Battle of Yorktown. I've spent my life explaining the
difference between mercenaries and adjunct armies f y I. After
the war, Hessians were actually encouraged to defect and settle
here rather than going back to hess. My ancestor married
a nice Pennsylvania Dutch girl and moved to Virginia. Uh.
(31:17):
And then he references some research uh that was done
by a fellow Heshian descendant. But Kirk, if you're listening,
you didn't include the link, Please do it because I
would love to read it. But it's an interesting thing
one to have a direct link. We always love those.
If we talked about it all the time, and to
uh the idea that they were kind of encouraged, like
just stay here, it's going to be easier than chipping
you back. Yeah. We got several, like several notes and
(31:38):
Facebook comments and things from people who whose immediate response
was my ancestor was one of these soldiers. Uh. And
we've we've had some who were encouraged to stay after
the fighting was over, and some who pretty much got
here and went, hey, okay, let's desert now instead of
fighting and go start a nice farm somewhere. I can
(32:00):
give the appeal. Oh me too? Oh yeah? Uh? Kirk
roach us on Facebook. If you would like to do
the same, you can do so at Facebook dot com
slash history class Stuff. You can connect with us on
Twitter at Misston History, on Tumbler at Misston History dot
tumbler dot com, and you can email us at History
Podcasts at Discovery dot com. We are also on pintriest
anning away many things. There are some images of actions,
(32:23):
and there john the uniforms that we talked about in
the podcast up there now. If you would like to
learn more about what we talked about today, you can
go to our website and type in the words man
eating lion and the article that will pop up first
is is there such a thing as a man eating lion?
The short version is yes, but there's also some really
cool interesting research in that article that talks about why
(32:45):
there is. And if you would learn about almost anything
else you can think of, you can do that at
our website, which is how Stuffworks dot Com for laur
on this and thousands of other topics because it has
to have works dot com. Audible dot com is the
(33:11):
leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
Audible has more than one thousand titles to choose from
to be downloaded to your iPod or MP three player.
Go to audible podcast dot com slash history to get
a free audio book download of your choice when you
sign up today.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.