170 Wild Monkeys Escaped On Long Island In 1935, Filling The Streets With Chaos
On August 21, 1935, around 175 rhesus monkeys escaped from their enclosure after a worker supposedly left a wooden board across the moat that kept them penned in.
Over the next few days, the monkeys wreaked havoc on the human community. They terrorized drivers on the roads, stopped commuter trains, climbed flagpoles, and looted local fruit stands. It was said that their leader was a sly and cunning simian named Capone.
The monkeys belonged to the best-selling author and movie star Frank Buck. He was known for capturing exotic wild animals and shipping them back to the United States, where they lived in circuses, zoos, Buck’s own attractions, and even other people’s homes.
By the time Buck died of lung cancer in 1950, he was 66 years old and had captured an estimated 100,000 birds of various species, more than 50 elephants, 65 tigers, scores of pythons, and hundreds of other wild animals. His favorite creature to collect was the rhesus macaque, a smallish simian monkey native to Asia.
He had so many of the monkeys that he once listed his bulk sale price as $850 to $1,000 for 100 monkeys. He was reportedly quite fond of them but also thought they were a handful.
Buck’s macaques became popular at the 1933 to 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. Around 500 of them were at Frank Buck’s Jungle Camp, prancing upon a structure called Monkey Mountain. Buck promised to give away one live monkey every week.
When the fair closed, he moved to Massapequa, New York, where he opened another Jungle Camp with a Monkey Mountain.
Not long after the move, the monkeys escaped. Newspapers reported that the animals leaped from tree to tree and swarmed down on 100 laborers who were working on the Long Island Rail Road.
The monkeys also blocked a train for five minutes until some crew members began tossing bananas at them. Volunteers with the Massapequa Fire Department had to use a 65-foot ladder to retrieve monkeys from flagpoles.
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A pair of monkeys climbed a high-tension transmission tower, which killed them and led to a power outage that lasted for 30 minutes.
The Jungle Camp offered $10 rewards (over $200 today) to anyone who could catch a monkey and return it to its rightful home.
People were so motivated by the money that some even turned in their own pet monkeys. Others left saucers of whiskey in the woods, hoping to lure the monkeys in and trap them.
Finally, only five monkeys were still on the loose: Capone and four females. The female monkeys soon got caught in traps baited with bananas and sweet potatoes. But three weeks after the escape, Capone was still at large. He had a $50 bounty on his head.
The whole monkey outbreak earned Buck a lot of money. Some newspapers suspected that the monkeys were freed on purpose as a publicity stunt.
Today, it is still unclear whether all the chaos was a stunt, but Buck did happen to be out of town at the time.
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