The Chicago Field Museum

 By Bruce Shawkey

The Field Museum of Natural History has been an entertaining visit for me on several occasions. One of the displays that has fascinated me is the man-eating lions of Tsavo.

The exhibit of the lions are one of the Field Museum’s most famous residents— and also the most infamous. Here is their story, as told by the museum.

In March 1898, the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo (SAH-vo) River in Kenya. But the project took a deadly turn when, over the next nine months, two male lions mysteriously developed a taste for humans and went on a killing spree.

Crews tried and failed to scare the lions away, forcing people to flee the area and halting construction on the bridge. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, the civil engineer at the helm of the railway project, took matters into his own hands so that work could continue on the railway.

The lions’ reign of terror ended when Colonel Patterson shot and killed them in late 1898, and the railroad was completed a few months later.

He later told the story of the lions, and the hunt that eventually took them down, in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures. Patterson reported that the lions’ feeding frenzy took the lives of 135 railway workers and native Africans. Later research by Field Museum scientists drastically reduced that estimate to 35 (which is still bad enough!).

Patterson turned the lions into trophy rugs from his hunt, where they remained until 1925, when he sold them to the Field Museum during a trip through Chicago.

Museum staff restored the lions to their former glory  by mounting them as taxidermy specimens and displaying them in a diorama.

Patterson's story was eventually made into a movie starring Val Kilmer, which I enjoyed very much, and is probably the inspiration behind this blog entry. Here is the museum's picture of them:

Here is the book that Patterson wrote. It is also in the Field Museum's collection:

Excerpts: 

WORK BEGINS AT TSAVO. When I landed at Mombasa, I fully expected to encounter many trials and hardships while engaged in building the railway through an inhospitable and savage territory. I anticipated engineering difficulties, perils from sunstroke and fevers, a possible scarcity of food and water. But never for a moment did I realize that the African wilderness held in its mysterious recesses two prowling demons who looked upon myself and my workmen as a sort of manna sent down from Heaven for their special delectation.

THE FIRST VICTIMS. Unfortunately this happy state of affairs did not continue for long, and our work was soon interrupted in a rude and startling manner. I had been only a few days at Tsavo when one or two workmen mysteriously disappeared and I was told that they had been carried off from their tents and devoured by lions.

  

The news of the death of the second "devil" soon spread far and wide over the country, and natives actually travelled from up and down the line to have a look at my trophies and at the "devil-killer", as they called me. Best of all, the coolies who had absconded came flocking back to Tsavo, and, much to my relief, work was resumed, the bridge was completed and we were never again troubled by man-eaters. It was amusing, indeed, to notice the change which took place in the attitude of the workmen toward me after I had killed the two lions. Instead of wishing to murder me, as they once did, they now could not do enough for me, and, as a token of their gratitude, they presented me with a beautiful silver bowl, as well as with a long poem written in Hindustani describing all our trials and my ultimate victory.