Despite the troubles that seemed to plague the first summer at the new Manhattan Beach, thousands of people still flocked to the resort, especially on weekends, and everything appeared to be successful. Behind the scenes, though, things were not going as well. In addition to two mortgages on the property, the park’s owners owed $60,000 to other creditors.
In August, George Darrow, as president of the park company, signed an indenture for $60,000 that gave William D. Todd control of the park. Todd, who at the time worked for the investment firm of Donald Fletcher and Company, was the former cashier of both the Denver Savings Bank and Union National Bank, the two banks that had the mortgages on the park.
Under the terms of the agreement, Todd was required to continue to maintain and operate Manhattan Beach for at least the next year to pay the park’s bills, for which he received a $4,000 yearly salary. Perhaps in a move to earn money for the park, Adam Graff also sold his ice company to the Colorado Ice and Cold Storage Company for $18,000 in stock. Todd was required to honor that company’s right to harvest ice on Sloan’s Lake as part of the new agreement.
Not included in the agreement with Todd was a $7,000 mortgage on the park’s animals. With that in danger of being foreclosed on, an agreement was seemingly reached in court that would place Todd in charge of the animals as well. At the beginning of September, three people connected with Elitch’s bought the mortgage and demanded immediate possession of the animals, which they intended to take to the rival park. Both the sheriff and coroner (who at the time was charged with taking control of property in cases of foreclosure) refused to allow Elitch’s to take the animals due to the existing court order that required the animals to stay at Manhattan Beach.
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Elitch’s hired Ed Keith, a private detective, to take the animals from Manhattan Beach by force if necessary. Keith rounded up about thirty-five men, described by the Denver Times as fellow detectives, and fifteen wagons to transport the animals. They set out from Elitch’s, one mile north of Manhattan Beach, shortly after 5 a.m. on September 11, 1891.
Just as residents of the Highlands had watched the animals arrive at Manhattan Beach in the midnight parade three months earlier, anyone who happened to be awake at that hour “beheld the awful panoply of war” as the so-called “Zoo War” began. The Times wrote of the “begrimed” drivers of the wagons, led by Sam Emerich, known locally as Sheeny Sam. According to the Republican, “the sun glinted over the mountain tops and the hostile forces right wheeled onto Byron avenue and formed in a hollow square” in front of the gates to the animal house on the east end of the park. Everything seemed quiet, and the Republican said “things were looking lovely for the besiegers.”
As Keith approached the gate, he heard a voice say, “Well I guess you fellows had better stop,” followed by the appearance of a Winchester rifle held by John Kerwin. “The first one of you who attempts to get in here will get killed,” Kerwin said. Far from being taken by surprise, the Manhattan Beach officials had been warned about what was planned and were prepared to defend the animals.
The Republican reported that about fifty armed men were inside the park’s gates, but both it and the Times said that only ten or twelve men were guarding the animal house. According to the Times, “each one was fired with determination to save Roger, the elephant, or die in the attempt.” Tenor Huntingdon, one of the men at the animal house, reportedly had a brace of six-shooters and a Winchester rifle.
Manhattan Beach employees had also attached the fire hoses to the hydrants inside the park with the nozzles aimed at the animal house gates. Keith convinced Kerwin to step outside the gates to talk, but Kerwin refused to let Keith take the animals. Kerwin went back inside the gates, which Keith said he was preparing to charge.
The Denver Times, humorously depicting the fight as a battle between opposing forces, reported that C.O. Hatch had also enlisted the girls of the Wilber Opera Company, which had been performing at the park, supplying each with a pair of boots in the hopes that displaying them as a “skirmish line” rather than a chorus line, would throw off the invaders.
As Keith and his detectives prepared to crash through the gates, Hatch held up an axe handle and shouted “fire!” The nozzles opened up and “belched out a deadly fire of Sloan’s-lake water. The havoc was terrible. The begrimed veterans from the north shrank from the withering fire, and men were bathed in water who had never had a bath before.”
The lawyers for Manhattan Beach later said that the park people knew that “water had more terrors” for Keith’s men than firearms would. Keith and his men gave up the charge, but they remained camped around Manhattan Beach for the rest of the day, apparently waiting to be paid off by the men from Elitch’s. Hatch told a reporter for the Times that Manhattan Beach was in the right, and that the “animals will die of old age before they will see Elitch’s gardens.” Deputy Sheriff Bob Stockton, who was in charge of the deputies at the park, backed Hatch, saying that if anyone from Elitch’s attempted to take possession of any property at Manhattan Beach, “there will be bloodshed.”
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The day after the “Zoo War,” the attorneys for Manhattan Beach, Pence and Pence, released a statement saying that the failed attempt to seize the animals was nothing more than an attempt to “alarm the public and create the impression that Manhattan Beach has lost its attractions” ahead of several large picnics that were scheduled at the park. Pence and Pence, in the statement, again argued that the law was on Manhattan Beach’s side, and said that the park would “pay off the mortgage before the animals were sold or lose the animals, but they will not be taken by any such efforts as these made last night.”
The matter quickly went into court on September 12, where Judge David Graham refused “to consider charges that the animals were being mistreated, and decided that they should remain at the beach, and that the gates should be thrown open and the place conducted as usual.” Roger the elephant and the other animals remained at Manhattan Beach, which quietly finished out its first season. It had been turbulent, but the park had survived. However, Elitch’s was not yet done with Manhattan Beach, and in the coming year a new rival, the ongoing battle over Thomas Sloan’s estate, and financial problems would cause even more trouble for the park.
During the winter, ice skating on Sloan’s Lake remained a popular pastime, and Manhattan Beach tried other events to keep people coming to the grounds. On January 24, 1892, the park offered horse racing on the frozen lake. The first race was a three minute, half-mile race with a $100 purse. The second race was a free-for-all with trotting and pacing for a half mile with a $150 purse. Ice cutters still harvested ice from the lake as well under the agreement that Adam Graff had put in place when he sold his ice company the previous year. But, overall, the year 1892 did not start well for Manhattan Beach.
Financial problems continued to plague the park, and elephant trainer Fred Knight, responsible for feeding all of the animals in the zoo, had to cut expenses even there. A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News visited the park in late February and found Roger the elephant “surly” as he was getting only five small bales of hay and half a bushel of grain each day.
The reporter wrote that Roger seemed to still feel “sorrow over the sad event [the death of George Eaton the previous July], for he swayed to and fro and shook his trunk with a vigorous swing that would have left little help for John L. if he had come within range.” Recent snowstorms had also made it impossible to get Roger or any of the other animals out for exercise for fear they would sink into the soft ground.
On top of those troubles, two of the park’s ostriches contracted consumption and died from the disease, while a chick had to be put down after it fell through a crack in the animal house floor and broke its leg. The skins of the two adult ostriches were sent to a taxidermist to make museum displays while the meat was fed to the lions.
The News speculated that the owner of the ostriches, who lived in Coronado, California, would demand the return of the surviving birds due to the health issues. To prevent losing one of the zoo’s most popular residents, William Todd, the trustee running the park under the agreement with George Darrow, purchased the ostriches himself.
David Forsyth is a Denver native. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Colorado at Boulder and works in the museum field. He is the author of “Images of America: Black Hawk and Central City,” “Denver’s Lakeside Amusement Park: From the White City Beautiful to a Century of Fun,” and “Eben Smith: The Dean of Western Mining,” and his articles on topics including bars, murders, bowling alleys, horror movie hosts and amusement parks have appeared in several publications.
