What does it mean to “see the elephant”? Jane D. Cairns traces the nineteenth-century American expression through Civil War soldiers, California gold seekers, and the era’s fascination with exotic animals. Exploring the tension between anticipation and experience, Cairns connects this enduring idiom to her novel Exalted Objects and Tim Schooley’s Circus of the Vanishing Elephant, where elephants become symbols of extraordinary dreams and the realities behind them.