The Tsavo Incident
The incidents for which the building of the railway may be most noted are the killings of a number of construction workers in 1898, during the building of a bridge across the Tsavo River. Hunting mainly at night, a pair of maneless male lions stalked and killed at least 28 Indian and African workers – although some accounts put the number of victims as high as 135.
The lions, dubbed "the Maneaters of Tsavo," were eventually shot and killed by the bridge construction supervisor, Engineer Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson, who had their skins made into rugs before selling them, some years later, to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $5,000 US.
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Famous quotes containing the word incident:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)