06/18/2026
The Pan-American Exposition began with a flash and ended with a bang. It was a grand affair, “transforming a begrimed industrial city into a various and undulating mass of color.” (Buffalo News, May 20) Unfortunately some of the “color” was blood. 1901 seems early for a “Crime of the Century,” but here in Buffalo we’re always in a hurry to get the important things done, because winter is just around the corner.
Before McKinley even arrived, Buffalo amazed visiting Vice (and Future) President Theodore Roosevelt with animal antics and be***al displays. The May 20th Dedication Day Parade featured a giant elephant who “elicited applause all along the line of the march… On his back he carried a gilded cage in which sat a woman surrounded by lions.” The elephant’s walk was unsteady, perhaps trying to keep time with “an Indian band, a Mexican band, a Royal Bavarian band, a woman’s band, a Hawaiian band, a Gypsy band, an Oriental band, [and] a gondolier’s orchestra.” A Buffalo News reporter observed: “The motion of his immense body caused the cage to sway to and fro to the very evident discomfiture of the tawny brutes inside, who were striding restlessly in front of their keeper, eyeing meanwhile with hungry glances the chubby boys in the crowd along the sidewalk.” (May 20, 1901) Referring to this woman in her gilded cage as a “tawny brute” seems insensitive, but she must have been pretty tough, to hang amongst lions.
(https://www.buffalorising.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Temple-of-Cleopatra.jpg)Temple of Cleopatra
But the main attraction of the parade, advertised day after day, was “See the Beautiful Cleopatra on the Midway.” Spectacle sponsor Alonzo Lincoln had been hard at work arranging for the Temple of Cleopatra installation, which probably resembled Las Vegas more than Egypt, and featured several commissioned paintings by Astley Cooper, to be unveiled at the start of the Exposition. To raise awareness, and eyebrows, he had put out a call offering $500 (about $20,000 today) “for a woman beautiful enough to represent Cleopatra and impersonate her in the parade on Monday. He received about 200 replies and 160 photographs of young women, all anxious to earn the money and confident that they possessed the requisite attractions. A Southern belle, however, won the prize. She is of a proud Virginia family… [and] made one condition, for social reasons, that her name not be disclosed… She is described as a stately brunette, 5 feet 9 inches tall.” (Buffalo News, May 18, 1901)
The anonymous Virginia belle appeared on her parade float, a re-creation of Cleopatra’s barge as described by Plutarch and Shakespeare:
“The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water. [Deck] was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description.
https://www.buffalorising.com/2026/06/over-exposure-at-the-exposition
