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:



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