When he landed in Chicago in 1924, British Army Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson had a death-defying story to tell, a tale once dubbed by Teddy Roosevelt as “the most remarkable account of which we have any record.”
For nine months in 1898, Patterson waged a war of nerves and cunning with a pair of East African lions. These “devils in lions’ shape,” as Patterson called them, dragged off and devoured 135 Uganda Railway workers at the Tsavo River. Construction stopped and railroad engineer Patterson turned big-game hunter by necessity; after several miscues and brushes with death, he stalked, shot and killed the lions himself.
In the years that followed, Patterson commanded a legion of tailors-turned-soldiers in Palestine, and was charged by an angry rhinoceros. But Patterson’s Field Museum audience on Nov. 29, 1924, cared little for that. They wanted to hear him lecture on “The Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo,” a story recounted in the film “The Ghost and the Darkness,” which opened Friday.
By all expectations, Chicago should have been just another lecture stop for Patterson, the lions’ fate left to speculation or superstition. But thanks in part to an off-the-cuff question and the colonel’s nagging debt, the lions wound up in the museum’s possession a month after his visit–and remain there to this day.
Museum-goers have largely ignored or overlooked the lions during the past seven decades, as Patterson’s drama faded into the history books. But when the Field Museum snagged them, they were, as the colonel boasted, “the most famous lions in history.” And their arrival in Chicago proved an unlikely postscript to what is still regarded as a stranger-than-fiction jungle adventure.
The details are recorded in a series of letters and telegrams stashed in the Field Museum’s archives. From Patterson’s first sales pitch to his thank-you letter to Stanley Field, the correspondence reveals his reverence for the museum and his desire to find a permanent home there for his prize lions.
Stuffed and mounted behind glass in the museum’s Rice Wildlife Research Station, the two male predators hardly look imposing, their fangs obscured, their sand-colored coats lacking manes (the lions were maneless when Patterson shot them). Killers? Lion King Cute is more like it.
“It’s always intriguing for me to watch people come up and dismiss these lions,” said Bill Stanley, the Field Museum’s mammals collection manager. “They’re not very striking.”
Even a scientist might have trouble believing these two cats were man-eaters. Wild lions rarely stalk humans, and females usually hunt the prey. But for reasons as unknown and mysterious as they were a century ago, these felines turned into killing machines.
Stanley cites several possible factors, including an outbreak of rinderpest disease in the 1890s that wiped out millions of zebras and gazelles, part of the normal lion diet.
“It’s also been speculated that when workers on the railroad died, they were buried in shallow graves, or not at all,” Stanley said. “Presumably, these lions got to them and developed a taste for human flesh.”
Patterson’s workers believed that the Man-Eaters of Tsavo were demon-possessed. And in a 1922 Chicago Tribune story, the colonel recalled the ominous warnings of locals that the lions were “the souls of native chiefs” angered by Great Britain’s colonial presence.
Lions had the upper hand
Unfazed by superstition, Patterson still acknowledged the lions’ knack for outsmarting him and his men at every turn.
“They appeared to have an extraordinary and uncanny faculty of finding out our plans beforehand,” Patterson wrote for a Field Museum brochure in 1925, “so that no matter in how likely or how tempting a spot we lay in wait for them, they invariably avoided that particular place and seized their victim for the night from some other camp.”
The British sent Patterson to East Africa to help build the Uganda Railway, a route connecting the old Arab coastal city of Mombasa with Lake Victoria (the 600-mile route is depicted in the movie “Out of Africa,” starring Meryl Streep).
“He was there to build a bridge over the Tsavo River” in present-day Kenya, Stanley said. “But these killings started, his workers deserted him and he had to hunt these lions.”
Patterson became so desperate to bag “the brutes” that at one point, he converted a railroad sleeper into a trap. “For the first few nights I baited the trap myself,” Patterson wrote, “but nothing happened except that I had a very sleepless and uncomfortable time, and was badly bitten by mosquitoes.”
Some nights later, a lion was snared. But the man-eater spooked Patterson’s Indian soldiers, who shot so errantly that they blew a hole in the cage. The lion strolled out as Patterson watched.
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo not only evaded cages, bullets and bright fires, but also broke through almost-impenetrable thorn fences and invaded hospital tents. It took a determined Patterson, perched alone above a half-eaten donkey carcass, to kill the first lion.
Several weeks later, he downed the second, but not before his gun-bearer deserted him up a tree–and the bleeding lion made a final charge that stopped five yards short of Patterson’s feet. “He died gamely, biting savagely at a branch which had fallen to the ground,” Patterson wrote.
By all accounts, the colonel’s story wowed the Field Museum crowd, including none other than the chairman himself, Stanley Field. In Field’s case, to rewrite the cliche, curiosity culled the cats.
Hearing Patterson’s tale, Field wanted to know more. He asked his friend the colonel what had become of the lions, and learned that they were serving as rugs in the Patterson home.
Patterson would recall that the second lion’s body was nearly destroyed before it was skinned. When the workers first spotted the dead creature, “So great was their resentment against the brute . . . that it was only with the greatest difficulty that I could restrain them from tearing the dead body to pieces,” he wrote.
Striking a deal
As much as Patterson had impressed Field with his derring-do, the colonel seemed likewise smitten with the Field Museum’s natural history exhibits. Two days after his lecture, the colonel wrote museum director D.C. Davies what must have been a surprising four-page letter:
“Since I have had the privilege of going through the Field Museum and admiring all the rare and beautiful things gathered from the ends of the earth and so artistically displayed in that magnificent building, I have been saying to myself, `Since you must part with your Man-Eaters, get them into “The Field” if possible.’ “
What made Patterson decide to shed the skins after 25 years? “I want to dispose of the Man Eaters owing to financial losses which took place during the war (World War I), and as I have shown them on the screen and lectured about them to a large and appreciative audience in the Field Museum, it has occurred to me that you might like to have them,” Patterson wrote Davies.
Patterson led troops in the Middle East during World War I, a rag-tag legion chiefly composed of London tailors “who had never wielded more deadly weapons than needles and shears in their lives,” Patterson told the Tribune in 1922. He missed his chance for fortune when he turned down a grant of several thousand acres in British East Africa–a reward for serving his country. “I was too much on the go to care about it,” he lamented. “But I’d have been many times a millionaire today if I’d taken it.”
Instead, Patterson, by this time in his late 50s, sounded more like a used-rug salesman in his missive to Davies. “The late President Theodore Roosevelt wrote that there was nothing to equal them since the days of Herodotus,” he pointed out. “I am certain that they would prove a great centre of interest in the Museum.
“They are in perfect condition and the price I ask is five thousand dollars.”
Three days later, the deal was sealed. Davies sent a letter to a Marshall Field’s representative in London on Dec. 4, asking him to ship the skins to Chicago. Patterson, on the road in Youngstown, Ohio, then telegrammed Davies on Dec. 6, with a helpful (if not expensive) offer.
“Am willing (to) go (to) Tsavo and collect complete accessories on actual site of depradations (sic) by (man-eaters) require no salary only actual expenses and would reduce these to a minimum.”
If Patterson hoped the museum would pay his way for a return trip to Africa, Davies wasn’t buying. He wired back to the colonel the same day: “Sorry cannot entertain suggestion.”
Reconstructing the beasts
Once the skins and skulls reached Chicago–sometime around the beginning of 1925–museum taxidermist Julius Friesser set to the difficult task of turning them back into lions again.
“The skill that was required to mount these things was incredible,” Stanley said. “They sat around in Patterson’s home for years. They were never prepared originally to be mounted like this. They were dried out, and there could’ve been bare spots from people walking on them or touching them.”
Comparing the mounts with photos of Patterson with the slain lions, it appears Friesser may have reduced their size slightly, owing to frayed edges that need to be tucked. Nor was Patterson a wealth of information when asked to provide their exact size and weight.
“I much regret that I cannot lay hands on measurements other than those given in (Patterson’s book) `The Man Eaters,’ ” Patterson wrote Davies in March 1925. “The lions were large animals for the species. It took 8 men to carry them to camp for skinning it.”
The colonel was able to supply photo negatives of Tsavo and a description of the lions’ den (Field Museum researchers plan to look for the cave next year). Patterson’s letters also reveal that sometime later he also sent over the lions’ legs, which he apparently kept in storage.
Museum zoologists used Patterson’s information to build their display case, which has changed only slightly in appearance over the years. The beasts maintain their original poses–one standing, one crouching–but the jungle grass has been replaced mostly by the thorny vegetation common to East Africa.
Patterson died in 1947, but not before passing his love of the Field Museum on to his son. Bryan Patterson, who died in 1979, became a curator at the museum, working his way up from the fossil lab to become a vertebrate paleontologist.
Writing Stanley Field from London in July 1925, the colonel made it plain how much he delighted in the lions’ new home.
“I am very proud to think that the `Tsavo Man Eaters’ will be in a place of honour in your splendid Museum,” Patterson wrote. “There is no place in the world more fitting for all the good things of the Earth to be exhibited.”
FROM TSAVO TO CHICAGO: THE JOURNEY OF THE BIG CATS
– 1898: Col. John Henry Patterson, a British engineer, arrives in Tasvo, British East Africa, to oversee construction of a railroad bridge. A few days after his arrival, one of his workers is reportedly carried off by a man-eating lion.
Over the next nine months, two male lions kill 135 workers. Railroad construction is halted until Patterson kills the lions.
– 1899-1924: Patterson has the lions made into rugs for his home, where they remain for the next 25 years.
– 1924: Patterson comes to the Field Museum on Nov. 29 to lecture. Impressed with the museum–and in debt from the war–he offers to sell the skins and skulls to Stanley Field for $5,000. Field buys the lions in December and donates them to the museum.
– 1925: After extensive work by a taxidermist, the lions are mounted in a display that re-creates their natural habitat.
