Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  When Gist visited Smith during his surveying trip in 1751, Croghan was his guide. At the time of that trip, Croghan had been operating in the valley for almost ten years. He built the trading post that Smith operated out of, he organized many of the Indian nations in the region against the French during the war, and he developed important relationships with merchant houses back east. By the end of the 1750s, his influence in the valley was such that he was given official positions representing both the Pennsylvania and London governments with the Indians. Croghan must have known about the salt lick soon after arriving in the valley, but the earliest surviving record connecting him with giant bones is from 1762. Peter Collinson, a wealthy wool merchant and member of the Royal Society, was one of those Englishmen who had had his interest piqued by the Ohio teeth. In June, he wrote to John Bartram, one of the most famous scientists in the colonies and co-founder of the American Philosophical Society, asking him to contact Croghan for more information. Collinson explained to Bartram about the object of his curiosity: “Their Bones or skeletons are now standing in a Licking place not far from the Ohio of which I have Two of their Teeth. One Greenwood an Indian Trader & my Friend Geo:Croghan both saw them & gave Mee relation of them.” Collinson hoped to get a better description of the rest of the animal, especially the feet and “horn,” to help “determine their Genus or Species.” The two teeth he owned had been collected by Greenwood and sent to him by the governor of Virginia. In another letter, written a few weeks later, Collinson told Bartram that he also written to “B:Franklin,” another friend of Croghan’s, about his request. Between Bartram and Franklin, Collinson hoped for a quick answer to his questions. Collinson would have to wait. Croghan was busy unsuccessfully trying to keep the peace between the British and the Native American nations unhappy with the shift from French to British power in the valley. It would be three years before Croghan could respond to Collinson’s request.

  When Longueuil brought his bones to Paris and donated them to the Cabinet du Roi, Buffon had only been made its director for a year. Throughout his career, Buffon worked to transform the king’s botanical garden and cabinet of curiosities into a major museum and research center. To this end, he hired Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton as an anatomist to assist him in writing his massive encyclopedia of nature, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, and help cataloging the various collections. In both of those roles, Daubenton had cause to examine the Ohio bones. He was probably present when Fabry visited the museum and told Buffon about bones and local legends. The first indirect mention of the bones occurs in 1761 in the chapter of the Natural History on lions, “The prodigious Mahmout . . . no longer exists anywhere, although its remains have been found in several places, at great distances from each other, like Ireland, Siberia, and Louisiana.” The next year, Buffon began working on the volume that included elephants. In preparation for this, Daubenton gave the Ohio bones their first really rigorous examination.

  Daubenton presented the results his research to the academy in August 1762 in a paper titled “Memoire on some bones and teeth remarkable for their size.” In this paper, he compares the Ohio bones to the mammoth bones brought back from Russia by de l’Isle and those of an Asian elephant owned by the king that had died several years earlier. As an introduction, Daubenton praises the modern science of comparative anatomy. He and his contemporaries no longer need to look to the imagination to understand mysteries like these large bones. Though his predecessors thought them to be from giants and the Ostyaks imagine them to be from an enormous mole-like creature, he is confident that he possesses the knowledge and reasoning to make the correct identification.

  Daubenton’s methods in examining the Ohio bones are precise and careful. His first examination is of the femurs and includes a detailed illustration by the same engraver that prepared Guettard’s tooth illustration ten years earlier. He shows that the bones of all three animals have the same basic shape. The angles and curves of the different parts of the bones are the same. The attachment points for ligaments and muscles are in the same place and of the same shape. The only meaningful difference between the three is in their thickness. The mammoth and the Ohio bone are much thicker that the menagerie bone. Daubenton does not think this an important enough reason to say the bones come from different species. It is much more reasonable to conclude that the differences are due to age and sex. With only one elephant to work from, he had no other way to test his thesis. He examined the tusks closely and determined that they were all made of the same type of ivory. This leads him to the same conclusion. The tusks all come from elephants; the differences in size and curvature can easily be explained by age and sex.

  Then he gets to the teeth, and here he encounters a real problem. The teeth from the Ohio in no way resemble those of the elephant or the mammoth. Daubenton couldn’t write to Longeueil to ask for additional information about the discovery. He had been killed in the wars with the British several years before. The only account he had was the short description written by Fabry. To address the mystery, Daubenton looked through the collection for teeth resembling the three Ohio teeth. The closest resemblance he found was with hippos’ teeth. Though the Ohio teeth were much larger, they had the same basic configuration.

  One possible explanation Daubenton considered was that there might be an unknown hippo-like animal with tusks like an elephant’s. Hippos do have tusks, long lower canine teeth, like those of a boar. Those, he pointed out, are normal teeth and not ivory, however. In the collections, Daubenton had a fetus of a hippo. This was well enough developed that he was able to compare the femur and determine that it was shaped nothing like the other three femurs. If he considered the possibility of an elephant-like creature with hippo’s teeth, he never mentions it. His conclusion is that the Ohio bones belong to two different animals: an elephant and a giant hippo whose disarticulated bones had become mixed together. The illiterate Indians who collected the bones mistakenly attributed them to the same animal. He also made a passing mention of the Theutobochus teeth as an example of how things can be misinterpreted.

  Daubenton’s paper was published in the 1764 issue of the academy’s journal. In that same year, the volumes of Buffon’s Natural History that dealt with elephants and hippos were published. For every animal in the Natural History, Daubenton wrote an anatomical essay and described the items in the royal collections related to that animal. True to his previous conclusions, he cataloged the femur and tusk from the Ohio with the elephant and the teeth with the hippo. Along with the Ohio teeth and real hippo’s teeth, he listed four other fossils collected by thermometer pioneer and all-around smart guy René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur in the early years of the century. Most of Réaumur’s teeth came from Gomphotherium angustidens, a relative of the mastodon that lived in the south of France and Spain several million years ago. Réaumur collected the teeth, but not out of a paleontological interest. He collected them because they appeared to be made of turquoise. At the time, the composition and origin of turquoise was very badly understood. In Languedoc, a type of turquoise was manufactured by baking fossil teeth that they mined in a strip of land near the village of Simore. Once heated, the partly petrified enamel turned the exact same color and the same hardness as mineral turquoise. Since most mineral turquoise came from Persia and no Westerner had ever seen the mines, there was no reason not to believe that it was not manufactured in the same way. The Réaumur teeth and the Ohio teeth, both types of mastodon, outnumbered the real hippo teeth in the royal collections.

  That same year, Croghan was in London pursuing some business interests. It’s not known whether he visited with Collinson while he was there. What is known is that he remembered his request for more bones and teeth and tried to fill it as soon as he was back in the Ohio valley. For two years, the Ohio valley had been the site of a war with British settlers and soldiers on one side and a confederation of Indian nations north of the Ohio led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac. The war had been one of massacre and countermass
acre, with thousands on both sides uprooted from their homes. Because of his long residence there, Croghan was trusted more than most British agents. The crown called on him to soothe the feelings of Indians along the Illinois River after the war. It was not an easy task. Before he could get to the Ohio, his expedition was attacked by white vigilantes who opposed his peace mission. They burned most of his cargo of trade goods and gifts. Nevertheless, he gathered what was left of his cargo and journeyed on. True to his promises, he stopped at the lick and gathered bones for Collinson. A week later, he was attacked by a group of Kickapoo Indians. His boats, with the bones, were sunk. Five of his men were killed and the rest of them taken prisoner. Croghan, though having taken a tomahawk to the head, was able to negotiate with the Kickapoo leaders and gain freedom for himself and the rest of his crew. Some French Canadian traders resupplied the survivors so that they were able to make their way back to Pennsylvania. The trip wasn’t a total failure. Before the disaster, Croghan was able to negotiate peace with the Indians along the Wabash River. This was enough success to make him a celebrity in the east and to maintain his credibility with the government in London.

  The next year he tried again with a much larger party. The frontier was quiet enough that some friends and businessmen came along. Once again, Croghan had the expedition stop at the salt lick to collect bones. Harry Gordon, one of the military escorts, came along “to view this much talked of Place.” Gordon was not disappointed. He wrote: “on our Arrival at the Lick which was about 5 Miles distance South of the River, we discovered laying about many large Bones, some of which are the exact Pattern of Elephants Tusks, & others of different parts of a large Animal.” The travelers spent the whole day exploring the lick and selecting bones. Croghan and George Morgan each made large collections. This time, the expedition went smoothly. After negotiating and making gifts along the Illinois, they continued down the Mississippi to New Orleans and sailed to New York arriving at the beginning of 1767. Once there, Croghan made a public showing of the bones before dividing them up and sending one batch to Lord Shelburne, the minister in charge of the colonies, and the other to Ben Franklin, his partner in his latest land speculation scheme. Shelburne donated his bones to the British Museum, where Collinson and others eagerly examined them.

  The first discussions of the bones among learned men were in letters. As soon as the bones arrived, Collinson wrote to Bartram in Philadelphia and Buffon in Paris, expressing his excitement. Ben Franklin was in London at the time giving Collinson and others the opportunity to examine the entire collection that Croghan brought back from the Ohio and compare them to Sloane’s collection of mammoth bones, which were also in he British Museum. In letters to Croghan, Franklin mused about the identity of the animal. As with Daubenton, he immediately saw that the primary problem was how to reconcile the teeth with the tusks. He wrote, “The tusks agree with those of the African and Asiatic in being nearly of the same form and texture . . . But the grinders differ, being full of knobs, like the grinders of a carnivorous animal; when those of the elephant, who eats only vegetables, are almost smooth.” Soon after the fossils arrived, Franklin made a short trip to Paris, where he was able discuss them with French savants. One of his correspondents was Abbé Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, who had recently been in Siberia to observe a transit of Venus and who had brought back some mammoth bones of his own. Abbé Chappe was fascinated by what Franklin told him and asked him to acquire a tooth or piece of jaw from the Ohio valley animal to study. In the beginning of the New Year, Franklin sent him a tooth from his own collection.

  After all the dangers braved to get the bones to him in Philadelphia, Collinson was finally able to digest the results and was the first British savant to get some comments into print. On November 26, he read a short letter to the Royal Society. All he had were questions, which he submitted to the membership for discussion. Now that he had some tusks to examine, he said that he “would not hesitate to conclude that they belong to elephants.” This raised numerous difficult questions. Why have no elephants’ teeth been found at the lick along with the elephants’ tusks? How did the bones get there? There are no elephants in North America, nor could they survive in that climate. Many have claimed that the elephants’ bones found in Siberia were washed there by the Deluge. But America seemed too far from the native lands of elephants for even this extraordinary method to be sufficient. As a postscript, he points out that teeth brought back from Peru the previous year bear some resemblance to the Ohio teeth. Two weeks later, Collinson was back before the society with two excellent etchings of a tooth and some further comments. To check his earlier conclusion about the tusks, he had visited a warehouse where fresh ivory from Africa and Asia was for sale and confirmed that the Ohio tusk is real ivory. His second observation was that the teeth were not necessarily those of a carnivore. An animal of that size would be too large to be an effective hunter. Teeth with high cusps like these could have been used to break up branches for food. For Collinson, the basic question remained, are these the bones of an elephant and some large, unknown animal intermixed, or are they those of some strange, unknown hybrid with some of the characteristics of an elephant and some unique to itself. By the time Franklin got around to sending a tooth to Abbé Chappe, he had become convinced that there was nothing contradictory in the knobby teeth belonging to a specific type of elephant.

  The next to publish was Dr. William Hunter, a Scottish anatomist and member of the Royal Society. Being a medical doctor, Hunter was better qualified than Collinson or Franklin to opine on matters of anatomy. Hunter had been interested in the stories of mysterious large bones from different parts of the world but hadn’t made any serious study of the problem. This changed when he heard about the arrival of Croghan’s bones. He arranged for the loan of a tusk and a tooth from Shelborne’s collection. Like everyone else before him, Hunter looked at the tusk and concluded that it was, indeed, from an elephant. Not quite sure what to make of the tooth, Hunter showed it to his brother John, who was also a doctor. Without hesitation, John informed him that the tooth could not have come from an elephant. The nobs and the coating of enamel showed that the animal was either carnivorous or omnivorous. This made Hunter doubt his conclusion about the tusk. He next made a trip to the British Museum to examine their collections. Here he confirmed that the tusk was the same as that of Asian, African, and Siberian elephants, but that the tooth bore no resemblance to any kind of elephant. Hunter next visited Franklin to examine his collection. He left Franklin’s home convinced that the tusk and teeth came from the same animal and that it was an enormous carnivore. Hunter interested Shelburne in doing more research and prepared a questionnaire to be sent to the colonies. The questionnaire mostly dealt with getting exact descriptions of the places of discovery. Like his Russian counterparts, he wanted to obtain a complete skeleton. If that was not possible, the bones he most wanted were a skull and a foot. Finally, he made a second trip to the museum to compare the Ohio teeth with other animals, including hippos and elephant-like remains from South America. Hunter challenged Daubenton’s conclusion that the elephant, mammoth, and Ohio valley animal were all one species. Based on Daubenton’s and his own observations, he was inclined to say the mammoth and Ohio valley animal were one species and the elephant another. It was a revolutionary claim.

  By the middle part of the eighteenth century, the learned men of France, Britain, Germany, and Russia had reached a consensus that the Siberian mammoth, elephant-like bones found in northern Europe, and modern elephants in Asia and Africa were all one species and they were quite comfortable with this consensus. Prior to the discoveries in the New World, the Republic of Letters felt that the remaining problem of the mammoth was explaining how the bones got into places where elephants could not possibly live. But the discovery of the mastodon in the Americas turned this consensus on its head. The burgeoning societies of scientists in Europe had to look at the bones in Siberia and Europe with new eyes.

  CHAPTER 7
/>   SIBERIA AND PARIS

  One of the great projects of the Enlightenment was the Encyclopédie, written by over a dozen authors under the editorship of Denis Diederot. It began as a simple translation of the very practical two-volume Chamber’s Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, but it grew to include essays by some of the best-known minds of France, including Daubenton, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. The first edition had seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of illustrations. Later editions would eventually grow to 166 volumes. It was the first endeavor of its kind, and to have a repository of information in one “place” was a revolutionary undertaking and achievement for intellectual culture, although some did not see it that way. The initial expansions included science and just enough philosophy to be considered dangerous by the conservative establishment. Although the Parlement of Paris condemned the book, the editors had powerful protectors at the court. They worked around a ruling prohibiting the publication in France by writing “Neufchastel, Switzerland” on the title page and continuing on as if nothing had happened. The first volume was published in 1751 and the final volume of illustrations in 1772. Despite it being extensive and expensive, the Encyclopédie was one of the bestselling books of the century. Three entries directly or indirectly refer to Siberian mammoths: Behemoth, Mammoth, and Fossil Ivory. A fourth entry, “Fossil Bones,” describes large bones found in Western Europe, including the Tonna and Cannstatt discoveries and the probability that they came from elephants. For the possibility that they might be the related to Siberian ivory, the reader is referred back to the “Fossil Ivory” entry.