The latter part of the 19th century was the golden age of the circus in America. A traveling circus with its acrobats, wild animals and the sideshow was an attraction not to be missed when it came to your town.
One of these circuses was the French & Company Great Railroad Show, which made an appearance in Alderson, West Virginia, on October 4, 1890.
Among the attractions with the French & Company show were the lions and lion tamers. While in Alderson one of the lionesses gave birth to three little cubs, which was a major inconvenience to the circus, for there was no room for them. The owner of the circus told one of his employees to take the cubs down to the Greenbrier River and drown them, then dispose of their remains.
It just so happened that the wife of the town blacksmith, Susan Bebout, was down at the river getting water when that circus employee showed up with the cubs. He told her what he was going to do, so the woman offered to take the cubs off his hands in order to save their lives. The deal done, Mrs. Bebout took her new charges to town. There she gave two of the cubs away to townsfolk who were interested in raising them. The one she kept she named French after the owner of the French & Company Circus and she proceeded to mother him as best she could.
The other two cubs died but French thrived.
Mrs. Bebout wrapped French in red flannel to keep him warm that winter and put him in a soap box with the family cat. By the following summer, though, French had far outgrown kitty, weighing in at 150 pounds. He also had gotten big enough and smart enough to figure out how to get out of the Bebout backyard to prowl the streets of Alderson. Although he was getting big, he was very stealthy, for he had a habit of sneaking up on people to then lean on their thighs and butt them with his head in the hopes of getting petted, something that would obviously unnerve folks who weren’t used to him!
Complaints about French’s behavior caught the attention of the Alderson city council and soon they passed an ordinance requiring all lions in Alderson to be kept on a leash, a law that is still on the books today. French continued to grow, to the point that the Bebout family decided it would be best for him to be in a zoo instead of in their backyard surrounded by terrified neighbors, so he was sold to the National Zoological Park in Washington, D. C. for $300. On September 12, 1891, French became the zoo’s first African lion, and he became quite popular with zoo visitors.
Alas, French had not found his forever home.
In May, 1894, he was traded to the Barnum and Bailey Circus where he spent the rest of his life as one of its attractions.
(Photo by Chrisbal – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74330659)
