Seeing the Elephant

Various written accounts and images of the Gold Rush period refer to "seeing the elephant." People who went to California often talked of having "seen the elephant." What did that mean? The saying probably developed in the United States about 15 years before the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, but people who heard the phrase in the 1850s knew exactly what it meant. According to J.S. Holliday in The World Rushed In, a farmer learned that a circus was coming to town. He was determined to see an elephant, a legendary creature he had never seen, so he loaded his wagon with eggs and other farm products, hitched his horse and headed for town to sell his goods and to see the circus. 

Along the way, he came upon the circus itself, also on its way to town. Lo and behold, the farmer saw an elephant! Unfortunately, his horse saw it also. Rearing in terror at such a frightful sight, the horse turned around, upset the wagondestroying it and all its contentsand fled. 

What was the farmer's reaction? "I don't give a darn," he said. "I have seen the elephant." 

To '49ers, "seeing the elephant" encompassed the whole adventure of traveling to California, arriving and getting rich or failing miserably, remaining or returning home, shivering in rags or strutting in riches. Regardless of what they experienced, even if glorious myth turned to hard-rock reality, they had seen the elephant. 

Fifteen years after the Gold Rush, the saying was still in active use. Southern soldiers often used the term for their first military encounter in the Civil War. After enemy forces entered her Virginia hometown, a Southern woman wrote in her journal, "We've seen the elephant at last." (Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention) 

Seeing the Elephant

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