Peter the Great: The Boxing Kangaroo and the Minneapolis Elevator

In March 1940 a kangaroo billed as Peter the Great was performing at the Builders’ show in the Minneapolis Auditorium when his tail was injured in one of the building’s elevators. Within about a week he was dead, and his owners, Mr. and Mrs. Ted Elder, were asking the City of Minneapolis for $75,000.^{1 2} The story made the wire services and the show-business trade papers. Peter had been, briefly, famous: the summer before, he had shared a ring in Atlantic City with Tony Galento, the heavyweight who had just fought Joe Louis for the world title.^{3 4}

Peter’s short career sits near the end of a much longer tradition. For half a century, audiences in Australia, Britain, Europe and North America had paid to watch men in boxing gloves spar with kangaroos. His death shows what that tradition asked of the animals involved. It did not, on the evidence available, bring the tradition to an end.

From the bush to the waxworks

The act grew out of an observation about wild animals. As a 2018 account by the State Library Victoria explains, colonists who watched male kangaroos fight saw them grip an opponent with the forearms and kick with the powerful hind legs, and they called it boxing.⁵ Showmen saw a living to be made from that resemblance.

The first celebrity of the genre, according to the same account, was Fighting Jack, who made his debut in March 1891 at the Melbourne Waxworks against a trainer billed as Professor Lendermann (the name is also spelled Lindermann and von Lindemann in the period press). Jack fought twice a day, then toured to Adelaide and up the east coast. His career raised an unexpected legal question. Olivia Mayne claimed that she, not her husband, had bought Jack with her own earnings and taught him his tricks, and the dispute became a test of a married woman’s property rights under New South Wales law.⁵ That case has since been studied by the historians Hilary Golder and Diane Kirkby.⁶

Jack did not live long. A Newcastle newspaper reported his death in November 1891, within the year of his debut, under the headline cited by the Library as “Another victim of influenza.” His trainer replaced him with a second Jack, who also died soon, and then with a kangaroo named John L, after the boxer John L. Sullivan, who took the act to London.⁵

A craze crosses the oceans

By 1893 the novelty had reached small-town America. That June a Wisconsin newspaper promoted a trained kangaroo with a touring circus, the Great Lemen Bros.’ Shows, which stood on its hind legs and tail and traded blows with human boxers, both sides in padded gloves. The paper opened its notice with a joke: “The fact that human intelligence is not essential to success in pugilism” was proved, it said, by the kangaroo’s performances.⁷

Two years later a boxing kangaroo had a part in the early history of cinema. On November 1, 1895, Max and Emil Skladanowsky showed their Bioscop programme of short films at the Wintergarten variety theater in Berlin. One item was “Das boxende Kaenguruh” (The Boxing Kangaroo); the film database filmportal.de lists a performer, Mr. Delaware, in the programme’s cast.⁸

In vaudeville the act could fill an early spot on the bill. When Variety reviewed the Gordon Brothers’ “Jeff Fitz, the Boxing Kangaroo” in 1909, the critic found a stage dressed with punching-bag apparatus and a roped ring, nine minutes of bag punching by the brothers, and then a three-round bout, placed as “an early number” on the program. The kangaroo had “a curious trick of catching his opponent about the neck and trying to kick him with its hind legs,” which drew laughs, but the reviewer noticed that the young man in the ring did most of the boxing and “practically hugged the kangaroo all around the ring.”⁹

Some performers lasted for years. A kangaroo called Aussie, caught as a joey in South Australia and trained there, became a London stage attraction, boxing twice daily for years. In 1935 a correspondent reported that Aussie had “contracted arthritis in the tail” and was going to the London Zoo as a pensioner. The State Library Victoria’s account also mentions Jo-Jo, a “world champion” who sparred in Atlantic City with the heavyweight Primo Carnera.⁵

Two-Ton Tony on the pier

Peter the Great belonged to Ted Elder, who had made his name in another branch of the outdoor show business. In 1931 The Billboard listed “Suicide” Ted Elder among the stars of the 101 Ranch Wild West show, praising his trick riding and his comedy turn disguised as the “Mysterious Russian.”¹⁰ By July 1939 an advertisement in the Bristol Courier in Pennsylvania, for Jack & Bob’s in nearby Trenton, New Jersey, billed a floor show with “Suicide TED ELDER,” a three-time world champion, and “PETER,” described as the “Only Boxing Kangaroo in the World.”¹¹ The “only” was promoter’s language: other boxing kangaroos were working that same month.

That summer Tony Galento was between fights. He had lost a heavyweight title fight to Joe Louis in June, a defeat that had nonetheless made him a celebrity, and he was signed to meet Lou Nova in September. On July 21 the Washington Post announced that Galento would make his “show business” debut seven times a day on the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City, against an elephant and a kangaroo billed as Hopsy-Maxie. The circus man Clyde Beatty, the paper added, had refused Galento’s request to box one of his lions.¹²

The bouts that took place differed from the advance notice. A United Press report printed on July 24 said that Galento had sparred on “Hamid’s steel pier” that Sunday with two kangaroos, Peter the Great and Battling Buckaroo, and that the referee had called both bouts draws. His manager, Joe Jacobs, then vetoed the elephant. “You gotta draw the line somewhere,” Jacobs said, worrying aloud about what would happen to the Nova fight if the elephant fell on his boxer.³

The UP reporter described how Peter fought. Whenever Galento put out his left hand, the kangaroo would grab him around the neck with its gloved forepaws, “balance himself on his great tail,” and kick at the boxer’s shins and legs with its bare hind feet. Galento complained that the kangaroos “wouldn’t fight fair.”³ Newspapers outside the United States picked up the picture. In British Columbia, the Victoria Daily Times ran a photograph under the caption “He Has the Jump on Tony,” explaining that Galento “looked around for lighter work and found it in a match with Peter the Great, a boxing kangaroo, in Atlantic City.”⁴

The UP description matters for what came next. Peter’s tail was not decoration. It was the third leg of the stance that the act depended on.

The Minneapolis Auditorium, March 1940

The two contemporary reports of Peter’s injury do not agree on how it happened. The Associated Press dispatch from Minneapolis, carried by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on March 23, 1940, said that the kangaroo’s “six-foot tail was nipped in an elevator at the Municipal Auditorium” the week before.² Variety, reporting the owners’ legal claim on April 10, said they blamed “a six-foot fall in an Auditorium elevator” that broke the tail.¹ Both reports agree that the elevator was in the Auditorium and that the tail was the injured part.

According to the AP, the Elders did not cancel their bookings. They “started out to fulfill show dates, with Peter’s tail swathed in bandages.” By the time they reached Albert Lea, in southern Minnesota, the animal plainly needed expert care. An examination found gangrene, and Peter died before the tail could be amputated. The dispatch gave his age as three and a half years, said he had been born in the “Waleroo desert” in the interior of Australia (a place name that may have been garbled in transmission), and reported that Elder valued him at $5,000.²

The sources do not say what treatment Peter had in the days between the accident and Albert Lea, or whether he performed with the bandaged tail. They do show that an injury to the limb on which his act depended was treated at first as something to work around, and that by the time he was examined, infection had set in.

A lawsuit and a taxidermist

The Elders then sought $75,000 from the City of Minneapolis, which owned the Auditorium. Variety reported that the city attorney’s staff wanted the body examined to establish whether the broken tail had in fact caused the death, and that an autopsy by a veterinarian had been suggested. That might not be possible, the paper said, because the body had already been turned over to a taxidermist to be mounted for the city’s public library.¹

How the claim ended is not recorded in any source read for this article. Neither is whether the mounted kangaroo was ever put on display. Both questions would need the Minneapolis newspapers and city records of 1940 and 1941, which were not available for this research.

Did the elevator end the act?

It is tempting to treat Peter’s death as the moment boxing kangaroos fell from favor. The record does not support that. Less than a month after the AP dispatch, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the opening of the Greater Olympian circus at the Chicago Stadium, where the attractions included the Zacchini brothers fired from a cannon, elephants, seals, “the boxing kangaroo and 60 other acts.”¹³ The act went on without Peter.

What changed over the following decades was public taste and, with it, public judgment. The State Library Victoria writes that the practice of training and exhibiting boxing kangaroos “would be condemned for its cruelty today,” and that the image survived instead as a national emblem, painted on Royal Australian Air Force aircraft in the Second World War and later flown as a sporting symbol.⁵

Read together, the sources describe animals whose natural fighting behavior was turned into comedy. The animals often did not live long: Fighting Jack died in his first year on the stage, and Aussie left the ring with an arthritic tail. In the 1909 review, the human partner spent much of the bout in a clinch. Peter the Great differed from the others mainly in the way he died. An injury in an elevator, days on the road with a bandaged tail, and an infection ended the life of a performer that the 1939 papers had treated as a sparring partner for a contender. His owners valued him at $5,000. The sources do not record what Peter himself made of any of it, and they cannot.

Footnotes

1. Variety, April 10, 1940, p. 36. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. AP, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 23, 1940, p. 2A. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. UP, Santa Ana Register, July 24, 1939. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Victoria Daily Times, August 5, 1939, p. 13, photo caption. ↩ ↩²

5. Best, State Library Victoria, 2018. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. Golder and Kirkby 2003 (Crossref record). ↩

7. Rhinelander New North, June 15, 1893, p. 1. ↩

8. filmportal.de, “Wintergartenprogramm.” ↩

9. Variety, September 25, 1909, “Jeff Fitz, the Boxing Kangaroo.” ↩

10. The Billboard, May 16, 1931, 101 Ranch Show review. ↩

11. Bristol Courier, July 19, 1939, p. 3, advertisement. ↩

12. Washington Post, July 21, 1939, theater page. ↩

13. Chicago Daily Tribune, April 20, 1940. ↩