In the 1920s, a strange but fascinating idea floated through American imagination: using hippos as a form of transportation—an “Uber” of the era, in a sense. The concept stemmed from a real proposal a decade earlier to import hippopotamuses into the U.S. to solve both a meat shortage and a water hyacinth problem in the South. By the 1920s, this notion had taken on a more whimsical life in pulp fiction and satire, imagining well-dressed flappers and gangsters riding semi-domesticated hippos through flooded streets or across bayous like living water taxis. These “hippo Ubers” became the stuff of surreal humor and alternative-history speculation, blending American ingenuity with exotic absurdity—though, of course, in reality, the plan never left the shores of fantasy.