Death by Tiger: It Happened in 1899 in Washington, DC

Circus Tiger by Maureen Siegart (no relation to Charles)

When one begins to explore the “cause of death” among the 65,000 interred at Congressional Cemetery, your imagination begins to recreate the ultimate demise from myriad illnesses, murders, train wrecks, auto accidents, drownings and the like.  But one really stood out to me recently: an 1899 death “by tiger bite.”  The cemetery is also competing for a share of $1M from AmEx and the NTHP until May 10, 2013 by popular vote.
     

How was that possible in Washington, DC?  Well, the Wallace Circus was in town, and so were its many animals.  21-year-old Charles Siegert was in charge of the shows ponies, but developed a strange and dangerous habit of sleeping on top of the tiger cage, which ultimately led to his demise.  As he slept atop a Bengal tiger named “Old Ben” the evening of September 4, 1899, he turned in his sleep shortly after 1:30 am and his leg dropped down the side of the cage.  The Washington Post reported:

A Wallace Circus animal cage

                “The beast appears to have put out one great paw through the bars, and with its long, sharp teeth clutched Siegert’s leg.  Siegert felt the horrible grip on his leg, realized what had happened, and, as the tiger pulled his leg into the cage, Siegert was dragged over its side.  The beast had his calf between its teeth and Siegert’s body caught at the knee of the imprisoned foot and hung full in reach of the tiger.  His cries awakened the whole tent and while men ran to his assistance the other animals roared and growled at the uproar.  Torches were pushed at the tiger; employees who were familiar with similar accidents got clubs and pushed them hard against the tiger’s nose.  He hung on till his own pain caused the grip of his teeth to relax and the instant they did so Siegert was pulled away.  His wounds were hastily dressed and the police notified.”

               

Siegert, ironically a butcher by trade, had joined the circus just eleven weeks before, when it rolled out of Tolleston, Indiana.  He had endured the horrible accident for a full ten minutes.  He was taken to Emergency Hospital, where the reality of his wound was revealed.  The Post described that “part of the calf had been torn away, and at the knee and the exposed bone showed indentations of the great teeth of the beast.  Muscles, sinews, and flesh hung in ribbons from the great wound.”                 

                An employee of the circus visited the hospital, but it was reported that he had no interest in Siegert, and coldly announced that he was only there to reclaim the bloodied quilt which had been wrapped around Siegerts leg.    

                Surgeons initially thought they could sew the wound back together, but eventually, at 8 pm on September 5, 1899, the leg was amputated below the knee by William P. Carr.  The stress, blood loss, and infection took Siegerts life just five hours later, at 1 am on September 6^th.  

As they say in the business, “the show must go on,” and the Wallace Circus pulled out of town that morning.  Little was known about his family, and after several days of local media attention, a local insurance man named Robert Cook took pity on the situation, purchased and buried him in Congressional Cemetery on September 7^th.  The site remains unmarked to this day (at Site 130/Range 250).   

A week later, the circus finally located his father Julius G. Siegert in La Porte, Indiana (who had been born in Russia about 1847), and sent him a telegram about the death of his son.  He wrote a letter to the Washington Post which was received on September 12, offering to pay for his son’s internment, but the funeral had already taken place. 

If you want to assist in creating a marker, now is you chance!  The cemetery has a kickstarter project where you can contribute, vote on a design, and finally get a monument installed at the site.  Think of the design possibilities!  Be part of the process HERE.           

The Wallace Circus

                Benjamin Wallace, a livery stable owner from Peru, Indiana, and his business partner, James Anderson, bought a circus in 1884 and created "The Great Wallace Show."  The show gained some prominence when their copyright for advertising posters was upheld by the Supreme Court in the Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Company case.  

Wallace bought out his partner in 1890 and formed the "B. E. Wallace Circus.”  It later merged with another circus and became the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. 

In 1913, the circus lost 8 elephants, 21 lions, 8 horses and several tigers in the Wabash River flood.   Its unknown if one of the tigers drowned included "Big Ben," the Bengal that killed Charles Siegert.

Another tragedy struck the circus just before 4:00 a.m. on June 22, 1918, when a locomotive engineer fell asleep and ran his empty troop train into the rear of the circus train near Hammond, Indiana.  A fire broke out and quickly spread through the wooden sleeping cars.  86 persons died and another 127 were injured, with many victims were burned beyond recognition.  Most are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois in a section set aside as Showmen's Rest, marked by large elephant memorials.

Copyright Paul K. Williams

The Man Who Could Bend a Dime with His Fingers!

Sadly buried in an unmarked grave at R80/S385 at Congressional Cemetery is Russian born actor, writer, and director Nicholas Alexander Dunaev, who appeared in no less than thirty-four Hollywood films in the 1910s and 1920s.  Long since forgotten, perhaps his most eccentric trait was his unusual ability to bend a dime in half, using only his fingertips.  He was obviously a hit at many a Hollywood party in the roaring twenties.  

And speaking of parties, Dunaev made news one night in 1924 when he joined Charlie Chaplin and other actors for dinner at the exclusive Café Petroushka in Hollywood when oil magnate Julian Pete reportedly bumped - on purpose - Chaplin’s controversial date, actress Mary Miles Minter.  An accomplished actress, she was black listed two years prior when she had been implicated in the mysterious death of director William Desmond Taylor.  A fight ensued, Chaplin received a punch to the eye, but our Dunaev came to the rescue during a free-for-all.  He punched Julian Pete twice, and was quoted as saying “If Julian had been a dime, I’d have bent him in two.”[1] 

                     

Dunaev was born on May 26, 1884 in Moscow, Russia as Nicholas Dunay.  He was the son of a Czarist nobleman, former Lord Mayor of Moscow, and a graduate of the University of Moscow Law School.   Active in the Russian revolution in 1917, he was an associate of Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government which was toppled by the Bolshevik revolution.  He was arrested and sent to Siberia in exile, from where he escaped.  He made his way to France, where he married novelist Edith Donnerburg; she died just two years later.  He once penned “The act of killing the spirit in a man, of obliterating all sense of honor, faith, and a desire for better things, is as surely homicide as through the man's soul were taken from his body.”

Dunaev came to the United States in 1919 to work as a writer, actor, and director at the Vitagraph Corporation, one of the first motion film companies.  To his new American friends, he was known as “Kolya,” short for his Russian accent pronounced ‘Nicholas.’  With the advent of “talkies,” Dunaev moved to Hollywood to work for the World Film Corporation where he earned another nickname “the strongman from Moscow.”  He starred with Otis Skinner in the original “Kismet.”  His self-written play “The Spider” starred himself, and played on Broadway in the 1920s.  

He married a Ziegfeld Follies danced named Ina Byron that ended in divorce after just two years.  He apparently garnered 100,000 votes for Roosevelt, earning a special commendation from the President.  He moved to Washington, DC in 1937, and eventually wrote the President in 1947 for a job, which he was denied due to his Civil Service status.  He was broke and destitute, he said, renting the modest apartment C at 1417 Belmont Street, NW (left, since razed).  He authored a novel entitled “Seven Doors to Sin” that was published by Vantage Press in 1954.  He eventually moved in with a couple at 931 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, when he fell ill and died in 1963.     

       

Dunaev once wrote “There can never be a happy ending to a poet’s life, for the ending is its essential tragedy.”   

Copyright Paul K. Williams

A list of movies and other works from the IMBd website at 

1. Two Arabian Knights (1927) (as Nicholas Dunaev) .... Mirza's Man Servant
2. The Palace of Darkened Windows (1920) .... The Snake Charmer
3. Kismet (1920) .... Nasir
4. The Devil's Riddle (1920) .... Paul Evers
5. Cheating Cheaters (1919) .... Antonio Verdi
6. The Velvet Hand (1918) .... Secretary
7. The Yellow Ticket (1918)
8. The Firebrand (1918) .... Dmitri
9. The Flower of Doom (1917) .... Paul Rasnov
10. The Pulse of Life (1917) .... Domenic
11. The Scarlet Crystal (1917)
12. The Reward of the Faithless (1917) .... Feodor Strogoff
13. The World Against Him (1916) .... Peblo
14. Who Killed Simon Baird? (1916) .... Kimba... aka "By Whose Hand?" - (alternative title)
15. The Yellow Passport (1916) .... Music Master... aka "The Badge of Shame" 

Your Old House Had Dead Bodies In It - Almost Guaranteed.

Putting the Nail in the Coffin

Have an old house in Washington, DC?  It’s most likely that you had a dead body resting in it for a few days.  I’m not talking homicide here, but a funeral.  In your living room. 

    

I just finished up a house history for a client near 20^th and Belmont Streets, NW that had a total of four funerals that took place inside the house, all within a twenty year time span.   I often write that the funeral took place in any given house, but now and then, a client requests that I don’t divulge if a dead body was ever in the house.

The problem is, if your house is more than 50 years old, it is most likely that many dead bodies have once been inside; people either died at home or their funeral took place in the living room.  As a young child, my mother recalls having to remove the Christmas tree from their living room for her mother’s funeral following her death on Christmas Eve.  Today, that scene might require years of therapy, but in the 1930s that was the norm.    

   

Most DC residents held their funeral at home, especially before modern funeral homes were licensed beginning in the 1930s.  You purchased a coffin made by the local furniture or cabinet maker, death certificate, and obtained a permit to transport a body to the cemetery, and that was the brunt of it.    

         

Before embalming became commercially available around the turn of the twentieth century, funerals were obviously held soon after the death.  Embalming was first developed and used during the Civil War by Dr. Thomas Holmes who was tasked with preserving the bodies of army officers so that they could be sent home for burial. 

  

But localities did not have that need, and it wasn’t until good old capitalism took over that traveling salesmen soon began visiting towns and cities across the nation offering embalming training and techniques, and – you guessed it – supplies for sale.  The first embalming solutions were arsenic based but were rapidly replaced with formaldehyde.

Over time, the liveryman, who was tasked with transporting the body, became more involved in the overall procedure and event coordination of death, and “undertake” many of the additional duties that began to become custom and tradition following the Victorian period.  Funeral and funeral merchandise expansion after the turn of the twentieth led to the term “Undertaker,” and they could be more efficient all in one place – the funeral home – beginning in the 1930s and 1940s.  They were often located in former homes turned businesses.   

    

Today, you might be surprised that most States only require a certified death certificate, a permit to transport a body, and that the body be buried, cremated, or donated to medical science.  No embalming is required, and many relatives are beginning to once again hold funerals in their homes as a cost saving measure.
  

Cemetery Party!

And as long as we are on the topic –I know your dying to know – let’s talk a little about cemeteries themselves.  I love exploring cemeteries, but I usually get the “how dare you" look or whispers that it is not respectful.  But then I remind them that I’m a historian, and they are about to get a history lesson.

Cemeteries designed during the Victorian era in the 1870s (and earlier) were meant to be not only explored, but to be used as parks, where one might spend the entire day, and spread out for lunch or long strolls.  They offered a respite from urban centers, high heat, and the smells of animals and smog of burning coal.  Cemeteries were outfitted with meandering paths, benches, and meadows where the entire family would gather and gossip.  You only need to look at old postcards of cemeteries to see that they were full of people, and not a place to avoid.  

Some existing cemeteries are now returning to their roots – Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill being an excellent example of attracting people to explore its surroundings and grave markers by creating a dog walkers group, volunteers for repairing and cleaning, and even a playful “dead man’s run” to raise funds for the restoration.            

Author's Note:  Entry’s will be a bit sparse for a few weeks as I’m on a deadline to complete my “Lost Washington” book due May 1^st 

Copyright Paul K. Williams