Tsavo, 1898
The man-eaters of Tsavo
Two maneless lions stopped the building of a railway for nine months. The number everyone repeats is 135. The research says about 35. Here is what is documented, and what a visitor can actually see today.
What happened
In March 1898 the Kenya-Uganda Railway reached the Tsavo river and work began on a bridge. Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, the engineer in charge, arrived days before men started disappearing from the camps at night. Two male lions were taking workers out of their tents.
The attacks went on for nine months. Work on the bridge stopped. Patterson shot the first lion on 9 December 1898 and the second on 29 December. The first measured nine feet eight inches from nose to tail, and it took eight men to carry it back to camp.
Patterson kept the skins. They lay on his floor as rugs for twenty five years before the Field Museum in Chicago bought them in 1924 for five thousand dollars. Both animals are still there, catalogued as FMNH 23970 and FMNH 23969, mounted alongside their skulls.
The number almost everyone repeats is wrong
Patterson wrote that the pair killed 135 people. That figure has been printed ever since, and it is the one the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness works from.
In 2009 a team published an isotope study of the lions' bone collagen and hair in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Carbon and nitrogen leave a record of what an animal actually ate. Their estimate for the two lions together was about 35 people: roughly 11 for one and 24 for the other. In the last three months of their lives, humans made up about 30 per cent of their diet.
Thirty five is still thirty five people. But the gap between that and 135 is the difference between a documented event and a story that grew in the retelling, and it is worth knowing which one you are being told.
Why they had no manes, and why that is a Tsavo question
Both lions were bare-necked, and that detail has fed a myth that Tsavo lions are simply maneless. The one serious study of the question found otherwise: eighty seven per cent of the Tsavo males examined did have a mane.
The real pattern is about heat rather than place. We set out the research on our wildlife page, including what the 2006 Journal of Zoology work and the 2002 Science paper on mane cost actually established.
What you can see today
The most useful thing to know before you come: the lions are not in Kenya. They have been in Chicago since 1924, and no amount of driving in Tsavo will bring you closer to them.
What is here is the country the story happened in. The railway still crosses the park, the Tsavo river still runs through it, and the lions living along it now are the same population, hot and lightly maned. Whether you see one is a separate question, and the wildlife page gives the real odds.