BOISE, Idaho — With 43 monkeys running loose in South Carolina after they escaped from a research facility Nov. 7, it got us thinking about Idaho's history with primates.
Primates have been a part of the Zoo Boise's collection since the beginning, according to Zoo Boise Director, Gene Peacock.
The longstanding tale has been that Zoo Boise started with a chimpanzee that escaped from a circus crew in the early 1900's.
Peacock told KTVB he's heard multiple versions of the story.
"Every version is a traveling circus was coming through the area... I've heard it was Mountain Home... I've heard it was Boise, and they left an animal," Peacock said. "The most common version of it is, it was either a monkey or a chimpanzee escaped, and it ran off into the hills. They found it like a few weeks later, and that was how the zoo was born."
In 1960, The Idaho Statesman interviewed a man named Norris Fritchman.
Fritchman said he was the one who found the chimpanzee in 1917. He said the chimp was sitting on a "fence post" and Fritchman enticed it with a banana.
He learned a circus was in the area the day before, and had travelled on the nearby railroad tracks, according to the article.
Fritchman kept the chimp at his house for about a month before giving it to the city of Boise. The city displayed the chimp in Julia Davis Park that summer.
But come wintertime, additional articles said the city got another primate and kept them both together in what was called "the day nursery of the municipal restroom."
Soon, after they felt it was time to start a zoo and add more animals. Including an alligator, that prior to the zoo sat in the window of a Nampa drug store.
Later tiger cubs arrived, and the zoo even got some bears.
By 1960, Peacock said "it started becoming a zoo proper and was the true beginning of what we know now."
It's hard to nail down if the circus chimp was the one who swung the zoo into action. Boise Zoo claims they started operations in 1916. While Fritchman recalled finding the chimp in 1917.
"It kind of becomes urban legend, and it's hard to know exactly," Peacock said about timelines.
But it is the story the zoo goes with.