In Marie Hoyt's book, Toto & I (Lippincott 1941), she recounts the horror she and her husband Kenneth felt as they watched the bushmen use nets, swarm over the remaining gorillas and kill them with spears, slaughtering them before their eyes.
Only a baby gorilla survived, full of fight and fury and was presented to a shocked Marie Hoyt as a gift by the chief, "too small to eat."
On Page 17 of her book, Mrs. Hoyt describes trying to quiet the baby gorilla and it finally settled responding to her murmurs to comfort her.
I was simply responding to the call of a helpless baby, left orphaned and alone in the midst of the African jungle by the blood-thirsty rapacity of men."
When Toto became too difficult to manage for her private keeper, Jose Tomas, she was leased to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus as a potential mate for another gorilla, Gargantua, a.k.a.