When 170 Wild Monkeys Escaped From a ‘Jungle Camp’ and Terrorized New York

Hugely famous in his day, if barely remembered now, Frank Buck was a best-selling author and movie star, renowned for capturing wild animals all over the world and shipping them back to the United States by the boatload. There, the creatures took up residence in zoos, circuses, Buck’s own attractions and sometimes even people’s homes.

Buck chronicled his expeditions in 1930s films like Bring ’Em Back Alive, Wild Cargo, and Fang and Claw—purported documentaries that featured the pith-helmeted, somewhat pudgy, middle-aged hunter and collector as their dashing hero. Buck’s derring-do, such as wrestling an escaped python back into its crate, thrilled audiences, though critics questioned whether some scenes were staged. Reporters covered Buck’s every arrival and departure, children joined clubs named after him, and Abbott and Costello featured him in their 1949 comedy Africa Screams.

When Buck died of lung cancer in 1950, at the age of 66, his New York Times obituary noted that by his own estimate, he’d “captured more than 100,000 birds of every variety, more than 50 elephants, scores of pythons, 65 tigers and also hundreds of other wild animals.”

Frank Buck recaptures an escaped python

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Among Buck’s specialties was the rhesus macaque, a relatively small simian native to Asia. He scooped them up in such quantities that he once listed his bulk sale price as 100 monkeys for $850 to $1,000.

While apparently fond of the little animals, Buck also noted that monkeys could be a handful. “No other living creature is so completely imbued with mischievousness, no other so triumphantly relishes man’s discomfort or can be so maddeningly impish,” he wrote in a 1939 book. Monkeys, he added, are “the personifications of perpetual motion, whose every little movement has a troublemaking intention behind it.”

Although they had to compete with other Buck marvels, such as the “biggest orangutan in the world,” the “two biggest pythons in captivity” and a pair of “giant dragon lizards,” the macaques became a crowd favorite at the 1933-1934 Chicago World’s Fair. Some 500 of them cavorted at Frank Buck’s Jungle Camp on a humanmade structure called Monkey Mountain. Buck even promised to give away one free, “live pet monkey” every week. When the fair closed, Buck moved his menagerie to Massapequa, New York, a hamlet on Long Island, where he opened a new Jungle Camp for local tourists with a Monkey Mountain of its own.

And there the trouble began.

All was peaceful until August 21, 1935, when as many as 175 rhesus monkeys escaped from their mountain, supposedly after a worker left a wooden plank over the moat that normally kept them in. (A similarly bold breakout made headlines last month, when 43 rhesus macaques escaped from a research facility in South Carolina.) Over the next several days, the animals terrorized motorists, stopped commuter trains, climbed flagpoles and raided local fruit stands. Their leader was said to be a particularly wily simian named Capone.

Newspapers across the U.S. covered the latest developments on a daily basis, often on page 1. “The papers had no war scares or kidnappings for their front pages at the time,” Buck later reflected, “so the truants were real news, and the boys kept hot on their trail.”

The day after the escape, the New York Daily News reported that “monkeys were everywhere—chattering, scampering, leaping from tree to tree. They swarmed down on 100 laborers, working on the right-of-way of the Long Island Rail Road, and the latter, with wild yells of fright, dropped their picks and shovels and fled.” When a train came by, the monkeys, under Capone’s leadership, blocked the track for five minutes, until resourceful crew members started tossing them bananas. Four days into the great escape, the Associated Press reported on a motorist who had swerved to avoid a roadblock of at least 35 monkeys, driving his car into a ditch and killing one of the creatures.

Meanwhile, volunteers with the Massapequa Fire Department had to erect a 65-foot ladder to bring monkeys down from flagpoles, according to the New York Times. Another pair of monkeys climbed a high-tension transmission tower near the town of Hicksville, resulting in a 30-minute power outage and fatal consequences for the two culprits.

The Jungle Camp offered $10 rewards (over $200 today) to anyone who could catch and return a monkey, and many locals took Buck’s team up on the offer. In fact, some people were so motivated by the bounty that they reportedly turned in their own monkeys (a more common house pet in those days than these). Some would-be trappers started to leave saucers of whiskey in the nearby woods, hoping that drunk monkeys would be easier to capture—and, supposedly, the ploy worked.

Day after day, papers tallied up how many monkeys had been captured and how many remained on the lam. At one point, the list of remaining escapees was down to five: Capone plus four female companions. The female macaques were soon caught in traps baited with bananas and sweet potatoes, but Capone (who had a $50 bounty on his head) couldn’t be fooled. On September 9, nearly three weeks after the zoo break, the AP reported that he was still at large. After that, the trail—or at least interest on the part of the press—appears to have gone cold.

Whatever inconvenience it meant for Massapequa, its fire department and its human citizenry, the well-publicized monkey business proved to be lucrative for Buck. As one local paper reported on August 29, “Last Sunday, over 10,000 persons who have read about the goings-on at the Jungle Camp overran the place in their curiosity to see the zoo and hope of catching a glimpse of one of the hairy fugitives.”

But some newspapers, including the show business daily Variety, suspected it was all a publicity stunt from the get-go. In its initial report, Variety joked that the monkeys “either eloped or were turned loose by the press agent.”

Buck himself had some experience in that area. “Early in his career,” says Elizabeth Hanson, author of Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos, “he had a stint booking vaudeville acts for a hotel, and in 1915, he worked as a publicity agent for the amusement zone at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.”

Perhaps coincidentally, in separate episodes a year before the 1935 breakout, at least two of Buck’s monkeys escaped from their enclosure at the Chicago World’s Fair, garnering both newspaper coverage and a lawsuit from a pottery company whose exhibit was smashed up by one of the creatures. Later, at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair, a six-monkey escape made the newspapers, too.

One syndicated columnist wrote that he didn’t know if the mayhem in Massapequa was a stunt or not, but “if it was, I salute the [press agent] who pulled it. Not only did it make headlines everywhere, but it coincided nicely with the reappearance of Buck himself … after a year’s absence in the jungles.”

Indeed, Buck was conveniently out of town at the time of the escape. Arriving in San Francisco from Asia about a week later, he told reporters he’d be rushing back to New York to take personal charge of the recapture effort. But he needn’t have worried about losing a monkey or two. The cargo from this latest trip, he noted, included “another fine collection of monkeys from all over southern Asia—15 varieties.”

Greg Daugherty | READ MORE

Greg Daugherty is a magazine editor and writer, as well as a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine. His books include You Can Write for Magazines.