The first clear mention of a mammoth in the Americas appears in 1743, though the discovery must have happened some years earlier. In that year, Mark Catesby published the second volume of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Like Mather, Catesby was a firm believer that the New World showed convincing proof of the truth of the Deluge. He gave several examples of sharks’ teeth, shells, and the bones of other sea animals found deep in the earth as far as sixty miles from the sea. His last example can only be a Columbian mammoth: “At a place in Carolina called Stono, was dug out of the Earth three or four Teeth of a large Animal, which, by the concurring Opinion of all the Negroes, native Africans, that saw them, were the Grinders of an Elephant, and in my Opinion they could be no other; I having seen some of the like that are brought from Africa.” These unnamed African slaves, at some date before 1743 and probably before 1739, when a slave revolt threw the district into chaos, were the first non-Indians to make a relatively correct identification of a fossil vertebrate in the New World. The closest any European competitors came was a possible tie. In 2014, after hearing the story of the Stono teeth, eight-year-old Olivia McConnell successfully lobbied the legislature of South Carolina to make the Columbian mammoth the state fossil based on this find.
The middle years of the eighteenth century saw Britain and France in a struggle for North America. The two countries had pursued different strategies for colonizing the continent. The British settled the east coast and moved westward as the French settled the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys and moved outward. Both strategies required managing a network of constantly shifting alliances with Native American nations who, naturally, had their own interests to protect and worked on managing the French and British. By the 1720s, the French from Quebec had portaged from Lake Michigan into the Illinois River valley and established trading posts there, but expansion from the Caribbean up the Mississippi had stalled north of Natchez. The French hoped to monopolize trade coming out of the Mississippi valley, but when they moved north of Baton Rouge, they found that the British had already established a trade relationship with the Natchez and Chickasaw nations using an overland route from South Carolina. Supported by the British, these nations blocked French trade farther upriver. After multiple attempts to lure them away from the British failed, the French decided to use force to open the river. By 1731, the French had destroyed or scattered the Natchez. The Chickasaw proved to be a more difficult problem. In 1735, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the governor of Louisiana and founder of New Orleans, gave up on negotiation and decided that, once again, war was the only way to deal with his intransigent neighbors. A great campaign was planned for the spring of the following year. The plan was a simple one: one army would come down the Mississippi from the Illinois country while a second would come from New Orleans through modern Alabama, and they would crush the Chickasaw between them. The campaign was a miserable failure. The two armies failed to coordinate their actions, arriving and attacking days apart, and the Chickasaw defeated them one at a time, inflicting a great number of casualties on the French. Bienville returned to New Orleans to plan a second campaign.
Bienville began his second campaign in the summer of 1739. This time, the New Orleans force was reinforced with cannon, mortars, grenades, thousands of pounds of powder and shot, and five hundred troops fresh from France. A second force, under Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville, was to come down from the Illinois country while a third, commanded by Bienville’s nephew, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, was to come down from Quebec. Longueuil’s force was made up of 123 French and Canadian and 319 fighters from allied Indian nations (186 de Sault Iroquois, 51 Two Mountains Iroquois, 32 Algonquin and Nipissing, and 50 Abenaki). Their planned route was to be almost entirely by water, up the St. Lawrence, across Lake Ontario, a portage around Niagara Falls, across Lake Erie to a place where they could portage into the headwaters of the Ohio River, and down that river to the Mississippi. This route allowed the expedition to perform a second service to the authorities in Montreal and New Orleans. The Ohio River was barely known to the French. By following this shorter route, Longueuil was able to assess whether it was superior to the established route through the Great Lakes and over the Chicago portage into the Illinois River. For this purpose, he was provided with a young surveyor, Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery, the eighteen-year-old son of the chief engineer of New France. Longueuil’s army left Montreal in several detachments over the last two weeks of June 1739.
A few miles below the site where Cincinnati would later be built, the army camped at the mouth of a stream on the southern bank of the river. De Lery noted on his map of the Ohio River that Longueuil made a formal showing of the arms of the king, claiming the land. De Lery called their camp “[The] place where the bones of many elephants were found.” One of the officers, Major François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, wrote in his journal how these bones were found. A group of Indians went hunting for fresh meat to reprovision the army. Somewhat later, a few of them returned, bringing with them a giant femur and tusks that the French officers identified as coming from an elephant. The hunters said that there were three skeletons of this animal in a salt lick not far from the camp. If the hunters were local Shawnee, who had been recruited to replace various deserters, they would have been familiar with the country and already known that the bones were there. They probably made a special trip to collect them and show the Frenchmen in order to impress them. Or, maybe they brought them back to show the other Indians as proof of their story. In either case, Longueuil recognized the importance of the bones and had them added to his baggage. The French officers made the five-mile trip to examine the site and collected other bones as souvenirs. Longueuil added three teeth to his baggage. The bones from the Ohio were not a secret. Longueuil’s officers told Bienville’s officers about them and showed off their own souvenirs. One conversation that we know for sure happened was between Lignery and Bienville’s secretary, André Fabry de la Bruyère. Lignery referred to his journal while telling the story. The journal has since been lost, leaving Fabry’s memory of his conversation with Lignery the only account of the discovery that has survived.
Militarily, however, the campaign against the Chickasaw was no more successful than the previous one. The cannons got stuck in the mud, draft animals died, the French soldiers got sick, draftees deserted, and the Iroquois made a separate peace with the Chickasaw after exchanging gifts of cheese and pottery. Rather than meeting the French in battle, the Chickasaw wore them down by refusing to engage them. In the late spring of 1740, the French had suffered as many losses to disease as they had to battle in 1736—more than five hundred men. At this point, Bienville called off the campaign and released the armies—at least, that part that hadn’t already deserted—to go home. Longueuil and some of his officers joined his uncle and escorted the sick soldiers downriver to New Orleans. As long as they were in North America, the French never did manage to defeat the Chickasaw.
Longueuil returned to France in the fall with the bones and teeth. He donated them to the Cabinet du Roi (the museum of the king), perhaps to salvage some goodwill after his military defeat. At the time of their donation, the bones failed to attract much attention. Academy member Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau was the only French scientist who was aware of the donation at the time. It is from him that we know of the three teeth that were donated along with the tusk and femur. It’s curious that Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the new director of the Jardin des Plantes, which included the Cabinet du Roi, only learned about the donation when Fabry spent the winter in Paris in 1747–1748. Fabry wrote a short note describing the discovery as he heard it from Lignery and orally told Buffon about legends along the Mississippi, calling the skeletons the father of bison (le pere aux beufs literally translates as “the father of oxen”).
Buffon’s ignorance of the discovery is doubly curious, considering that word of the discovery had been published twice as notes on important maps. Phi
lippe Mandeville, a member of the Louisiana contingent, used de Lery’s notes to draw the first map. On it he made the notation “Place where the bones of many elephants were found by the army from Canada commanded by the Baron de Longuille [sic], and where he had the Arms of the King set up in 1739.” When Mandeville’s manuscript map was used by Jacques Nicolas Bellin in his new map of North America published in 1744, the engraver made a mistake and marked the date as 1729. In 1756, in a letter published in 1763, Jean-Bernard Bossu wrote that the discovery was made in 1735 during Bienville’s earlier unsuccessful campaign against the Chickasaws and inflated the number of skeletons from three to seven. Confusion about the year of the discovery has persisted ever since. Longueuil’s visit was definitely in 1739, and it is the earliest recorded visit by a European to the site, now called Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. But it wasn’t the last. In 1755, the British printer Lewis Evans published a “Map of the Middle British Colonies in America.” Along the Ohio River was a small notation “Elephant Bones found here.” Evans could have received this information either from Bellin’s map or from British traders who had begun to move into the Ohio valley by then.
Through the 1740s, the bones of the Ohio, like the teeth of the Hudson, remained more of a local curiosity then objects of serious study. This began to change in the early 1750s. By then, the colonies were beginning to develop their own intellectual institutions. Along with universities, English America got its own scientific society in 1743 when Ben Franklin and a group of like-minded men founded the American Philosophical Society. In 1752, the Swiss geologist Jean-Étienne Guettard presented a paper before the French Académie des sciences. The topic was a comparison of the geology of Switzerland and North America. Guettard had an interest in fossils and included a short section on the fossils of North America. Guettard’s paper was published in the journal of the academy in 1756. In what appears to be addition to the paper at the time of publication, the paper includes two plates of a large tooth and a small crinoid fossil. The tooth is easily identifiable as coming from a mastodon. These are the first published images of mastodon teeth. In fact, they are the oldest surviving drawings of them in any medium. Guettard’s images show a long tooth with ten conical cusps (one of them broken off) and long roots. The cusps are separated by deep valleys. The upper part of the tooth appears to be made of enamel like a human tooth. As was often the case with etchings of the time, the images are reversed. Of the plates, he writes: “I should have so much desired to compare a large fossil tooth that is from the place that is marked on maps of Canada as the canton where elephant bones are found. What animal is it? And does it resemble fossil teeth of this size that we have found in different parts of Europe? I present this figure; the research we do on it later should shed some light on the subject.” He goes on to say that Jean-François Gautier, a prominent Canadian naturalist, had sent him a note commenting on his draft. Gautier wrote, “All those who have been to this place, who have seen the skeletons or bones of these animals, relate that the skeletons are almost complete. We do not assume that they include the teeth, because these are the only parts that we can easily carry away. The other bones are too large and too heavy.” Gautier added that he will have Father Bonnecamp, a Jesuit of impeccable scientific credentials, make drawings of the skeletons during his next trip down the Ohio. Bonnecamp had traveled down the Ohio in 1749, though not as far as the Big Bone Lick. He never made another expedition, and Guettard’s works make no mention of him examining any other “elephants’” teeth.
There is some mystery that remains about this tooth. Though most modern reproductions of the plates identify the tooth as one of Longueuil’s, it does not match any of the descriptions or drawings published at the time of the teeth Longueuil brought back. In 2002, Pascal Tassy went through the fossil collection at the museum trying to identify Longueuil’s bones. In the 260 years since their donation, the bones were cataloged three times and given different numbers each time. Old numbers rubbed away, tags fell off, and the collections were moved several times. But Tassy was successful and located all three teeth with traces of their original identification numbers visible under a black light. He also located the tooth in Guettard’s illustration. After some detective work, he was able to match the tooth to a number in an 1861 inventory with the notation “Collection Drée.” From here, he was able to find an illustration of the tooth and a reference to Drée in Georges Cuvier’s Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles (1806). This makes the person who donated the tooth to the museum, Étienne, Marquis de Drée, a prominent politician who aided Cuvier’s researches by allowing him access to his collections. Drée, however, was not born until 1760. The tooth had to have had at least one other owner before Drée added it to his collection. The simplest solution is that Gautier sent it to Guettard sometime before 1756 and that he sold or gave it to Drée sometime before his death in 1786, but a definitive answer remains elusive.
Meanwhile, back at the place where these teeth were discovered, British Americans had no interest in respecting the French crown’s claim to the Ohio country. Within a few years, possibly months, of Longueuil’s passage, British traders from Virginia and Pennsylvania began working the valley. In the 1750s, hostilities broke out between French and British in the valley. This soon escalated into real war, with both sides sending military expeditions enforce their claims. In 1756, the Seven Years War broke out in Europe with Britain and France on opposite sides. Today, in the United States, the colonial front in the war is called the French and Indian War. After some initial victories, the French were driven out of the Ohio valley. The American phase of the war was essentially over by the end of 1760, when the British conquered Quebec. In Europe, the war continued for another three years, ending in the defeat of France and its allies. According to the terms of the Treaty of Paris, France gave up all of its territories on the mainland of North America. During these years, there was no opportunity for the French to collect new bones for study. This was not the case for the British.
In the years before Guettard’s paper was published and hostilities broke out in North America, French informants were not the only people passing around stories of bones and actual bones from the country surrounding the Ohio. British merchants found more massive bones and told the educated men of Philadelphia and New York about them. Unlike Gauthier’s vague references, specific dated descriptions of discoveries were shared in Anglo America and made their way into print in the 1760s. Soon after Longueuil’s army returned to Quebec, a merchant named Robert Smith settled in the valley of the Great Miami River, a tributary of the Ohio, which debouches a few miles above the same salt lick. On the opposite side of the river, Smith discovered the salt lick and its bones in 1744. He later told the surveyor Christopher Gist that he saw three skeletons there, possibly the same ones Longueuil’s hunters reported five years earlier. Smith also told Gist about the tusks, saying they were five feet long and very heavy. He tried to carry one away, but ended up hiding it so the French wouldn’t take it. He failed to say if he ever retrieved it. Gist, who recorded Smith’s story, was hired in 1751 to survey the river down to the Falls of the Ohio where present day Louisville, Kentucky, is located. He was intrigued by the story and asked Smith to see if he could acquire some teeth for him. Gist never quite made to the falls, though he came close. While approaching the falls on the Kentucky side of the river, he met two of Smith’s employees, who were bringing him a pair of giant teeth. Smith’s men told him that it wasn’t safe to go any farther; there were hostile French and Shawnee in the area. Gist took their advice and returned to Virginia, passing the salt lick on the way without stopping to see the bones firsthand. Once back, he gave one of the teeth to his employer and kept the other for himself.
In the summer of 1755, a group of Shawnee warriors attacked the small settlement of Draper’s Meadow in western Virginia. Several settlers were killed, including an infant, and five were taken prisoner. These were Mary Draper Ingles, her two young sons, her sister-in-law, and an
unrelated man. The captives were split up, and Ingles was taken west to an encampment of French and Shawnee just above mouth of the same salt lick stream where Smith had seen his bones four years earlier and Longueuil had seen them twelve years prior to that. This may have been the same group that Gist was told to avoid. Ingles and another captive, known only as “the old Dutch woman,” were taken to the salt lick. The two were put to work boiling water to collect salt. In October, they found two French soldiers sitting on a giant bone cracking walnuts. Ingles convinced them to give her a tomahawk, and she and the Dutch woman made their escape. It took the two women forty days to walk back to English civilization as winter was falling. Ingles told the story of her captivity and escape many times during her long life. After her death, one of her sons published her story, which included the reference to the giant bone the French soldiers were casually using as a seat. Since then, it has been retold by historians, novelized, and made into movies.
By the early sixties, the mysterious bones were becoming fairly well known in the British colonies. In 1762, another group of Shawnee, who had been allied with the French during the war, brought a tusk and a tooth to the commander of Fort Pitt as a peace offering. That same year, James Kenny, the manager of a trading post owned by the Pennsylvania government, wrote “that this Continent Produces Elephants, as Large Teeth have been found in a Lick down ye Ohio between 4 & 6 pound weight, one of which I seen Weigh’d, which Weighed 4 ¼ lb.” The following year, he reported that he recorded the alternative theory of Benjamin Sutton, a trapper who have been to the lick and measured some of the bones. In Sutton’s opinion, the bones came from “the Rhinosses or Elephant Master, being a very large Creature of a Dark Colour having a long Strong horn growing upon his Nose (with which he kills Elephants).” There were others. Important men in Philadelphia, New York, and London heard these stories and received teeth as gifts. They wanted to know more. The man best placed to answer their questions was George Croghan, an Irish trader, land speculator, and, arguably, the most influential white man in the Ohio valley.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 18
