This day in history: Tara the elephant was moving on up from the Walk in the Wild Zoo

From 1974: Taro, the elephant at Spokane’s Walk in the Wild Zoo, was set to get a spacious new outdoor home, dubbed Elephant Canyon.

A group of Army engineers from the 659th Engineer Company at the Army Reserve Center in Hillyard was constructing the Elephant Canyon.

No cage bars were needed.

“The reservists are moving earth and rock from other parts of the zoo site to bolster the canyon walls,” The Spokesman-Review reported.

Unfortunately, by 1976 Taro would grow “too large and ornery,” and had to be shipped to California and sold.

Walk in the Wild closed at the end of 1995, after operating for 21 years at today’s Mirabeau Point Park.

From 1924: A new airborne bootlegger was plying the skies of the region.

In the dark of night, an “illicit aerial liquor vender has swooped down near Long Lake” and also in the Mead area, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported. Autos were waiting to unload the cargo, but so far the cars had vanished before police arrived.

Police were checking the district’s airplanes, but so far they had “failed to reveal the one that is hauling booze.” Police believed the pilot was from “northern points” – possibly Canada.

Also on this day

(From on this day.com)

1863: Abraham Lincoln issues his Amnesty Proclamation and plan for Reconstruction of the South.

1941: U.S. and Britain declare war on Japan; U.S. enters World War II.

1941: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers his famous “Day of Infamy” speech to a joint session of Congress a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.