The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1880-02-27
Tigers and Elephants in India . Cen
tury Ago.

tury Ago.
Ten years after the famine of ITO. a
once p0pulous district was q silent jun
gle; and in 1850 small body of Sepoys
could with difficulty force its way
through its forests. For one hundred
and twenty miles," says an eyewitness,
" they marched through but an ex-
tensive wood, all the way perfect will
derness; sometimes small village pre-
sented itself in the midst of these jun
giles, with q little cultivated ground
around it, hardly sufficient to encamp
the two battalions. These woods abound
with tigers and bears. which infested the
camp every night, butdid no other dam
age than carrying off child and killing
some of the gentlemen's baggage-bul-
locks" As the rural communities re-
inquished their hamlets and drew closer
together toward the center of district,
the wild beasts pressed hungrily on their
rear. In vain the East India Company
offered reward for each tigers head
sufficient to maintain PEASANTS family
in comfort for three months; an item of
outlay which our officers deemed so i'm
portant, that when, in the financial
crisis of 1790-91, the Treasury
had to suspend all payments, and
it made the tiger money and
diet allowance for prisoners the sole ex-
ceptions to the rule. In vain it spent
the whole land revenue of q frontier dis
trict in rewards for killing wild beasts.
A belt of jungle filed with ferocious
animals lay for years around the cult
waited land. The official records fire.
quently speak of the mail-bags being
carried off by tigers, and the custom of
the mail-runners carrying jangling rings
or bells to scare away the wild beasts
survived to our own day. Lord Corn
wallis, in 1850, had to sanction a grant
of public money to free the military road
from the depredations of these animals.
The ravages of the wild elephants were
on larger scale, and their extermina-
ton formed one of the most important
duties of the British officers after the
country passed under our rule. Tigers,
leopards and wolves slew their thousands
of men and their hundreds of thousands
of cattle. But the herd of wild elephants
was absolutely resistless, lifting off
roofs, pushing down walls, trampling a
village under foot as if it were q city of
sand which a child had built upon the
shore. In two parishes alone, during
the last few years of the native admin
istration, fifty-six hamlets with their sur
rounding lands chad all been destroyed
and gone to jungle, caused by the dep
relations of wild elephants. Another
official return states that forty market
villages throughout Birbhum district
had been deserted from the same cause.
Large reductions had to be made in the
land-tax, and the East India Company
borrowed tame elephants from the
native Viceroy's stud in order to catch
the wild ones. 81 had ocular proof
on my Journey" writes an English
officer in 1871, "of their ravages.
The poor timid native ties his cot in q
tree, to which he retires when the
elephants approach, and silently views
the destruction of his cottage and the
whole profits of his labor "One
night" writes an English surveyor in
1910, "although 1 had a guard, the
men of the village close to my tent
retired to the trees, and the women hid
themselves among the cattle, leaving
their huts prey to the elephants, who
know very well where to look for grain.
Two nights before, some of them had
unroofed hut in the village, and had
eaten up all the grain which q poor
family possessed" "Most fortunately
for the population of the country"
wrote the greatest elephant-hnnter of
the last century, "they delight in the
sequestered range of the mountains; if
they preferred the plain, whole king
doms would be laid waste. y Corn
hill Magazine.