Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1900-08-13

Speaking in the house Of lords OF
the progress of the Uganda railway,
Lord Salisbury mentioned that among
the unexpected difficulties encount-
cred were a pair of man-eating lions,
which stopped the works for three
weeks before they were shot. AS
some 5000 men were at work on the
line, the intimidation by two lions
seems almost incredible.
Yet it is a fact that so dreadful was
the pressure exercised by the constant
attacks of this pair of man Destroy
ing wild beasts, and so cumulative the
fear caused among the Indian laDorers
nv the sight and sound of their COM
rades being dragged off and devoured,
that hundreds of these Industrious
workmen, trained on similar duties
under the service of the government
of India, abandoned their employment
and pay, and crying out that they
agreed to work for wages, not to be
food for lions or devils, rushed to
the lines as the trains for the coast
were approaching, and 1inging them
selves across the rails, gave the en-
gineers the choice either of passing
ing over their bodies or of stopping
to take them up and carry them back
to Mombasa.
Many of these men were not timid
Hindoos, but sturdy Sikhs. Yet the
circumstances were so unique, and the
scenes witnessed from week to week
so bloody and appalling, that their
panic and desperation are no matter
for surprise.
Though the works were stopped for
three weeks, the lions campaign last
ed. with intervals of quiet when one
or the other had been wounded, from
March to the end Of December. In
this time they killed and ate twenty
eight Indians, and it is believed at
least twice this number of natives,
Swahisis and the like; besides wound
ing and attacking others. They at
tackled white engineers, doctors, sol
diers and military officers, armed
Abyssinian askaris, Sepoys, bunniahs,
coolies and porters. Some they claWed,
some they devoured, some they car
ried off and left sticking in thorn
fences, because they could not drag
them through.
At first they were ccntented to take
one man between them. Before the
end Of their career they would take
man apiece on the same night, some
times from the same hut or camp fire.
The plain, unvarnished tale OF this
<"prehistoric revival" of the position
originally held by man in the struggle
for existence against ravenous beasts
is set out at considerable length and
detail by Mr.. J. H. Patterson, one OF
the engineers of the line, who, after
months of effort and personal risk,
succeeded in breaking the spell, and
killing both the lions, which the ma
tives had come to regard as devils,
that is, as equivalent to were-wolves,
and guided by the local demons.
The parallel to the story Of the
lions which stopped the rebuilding OF
Samaria must occur to every one, and
if the Samaritans had quarter as good
cause for their fears as had the rail-
way coolies their wish to propitiate
the local deities is easily understood.
Lion Stories Eclipsed.
If the whole body of lion anecdotes,
from the days of the Assyrian kings
till the last year of the nineteenth
century, were collated and brought
together it would not be equal in
tragedy OR atrocity in savageness or
in sheer insolent contempt for man,
armed or unarmed. white or black, to
the story of these two beasts. The
scene of their exploits was only 100
miles from the coast, in the valley of
a cool and swift stream, the Tsavos
river.
Filled by the melting of the SHOWS
on Kilimanjaro, bordered with palms
and ferns, and at a further distance by
a dense and impossible jungle Of
thorns, it's banks became suddenly the
camping grounds of thousands of hard
working Indian railway men, who
slept in camps scattered up and down
the line for some eight miles. Into
these camps the lions came, thrustlng
their gigantic heads under the flaps Of
the tents, or walking in at the doors
of the huts.
Their first victim was Sikh jenna
dar, taken from a tent shared by a
dozen other workmen; the next a
coolie Then they raided the camps
regularly until the local length of rail
was finished, and the bulk Of the men
moved up country out of the lions
beat. But some hundreds were left be-
hind tn hui1d bridges and do perma-
nent work. 1t was then that the
lions reign of terror began, an i'm
perial enterprise supplied with every
mechanism and appliance of civiliza-
ton, from traction engines to armed
troops.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of
the pressure to which these beasts
subjected the dominant biped man is
that they forced him to become