Inspired mostly by this article: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...ons-all-american-monsters-8898672/?all&no-ist
So, how could one get the United States (with a PoD at any point in US history) to embrace the mammoth as the symbol of American might and endurance, rather than the Eagle?
At the same time, mammoths and mastodons gave Americans a symbol of national might at a time when they badly needed one.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the French naturalist, had declared that “a niggardly sky and an unprolific land” caused species in the New World—including humans—to become puny and degenerate. “No American animal can be compared with the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus,” he sniffed in 1755. Even the American Indian is “small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female.” Because Buffon was one of the most widely read authors of the 18th century, his “theory of American degeneracy” became conventional wisdom, at least in Europe.
Clearly offended, Thomas Jefferson (who stood 6-foot-2) constructed elaborate tables comparing American species with their puny Old World counterparts—three-and-a-half pages of bears, bison, elk and flying squirrels going toe-to- toe. In the early 1780s, he wrote that the mammoth, “the largest of terrestrial beings,” should have “stifled in its birth” Buffon’s notion “that Nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than she is on the other. As if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun; as if a soil of the same chemical composition was less capable of elaboration into animal nutriment.” When Jefferson sailed to Paris in 1784 to represent the new United States, he packed “an uncommonly large panther skin” with the idea of shaking it under Buffon’s nose. He later followed up with a moose. (Buffon promised to amend his errors in the next edition of his book, according to Jefferson, but died before he could do so.)
It wasn’t just a matter of wounded pride. For American envoys in the 1770s and ’80s, refuting the idea of innate inferiority was essential “if they were to obtain sorely needed financial assistance and credit in Europe,” says anthropologist Thomas C. Patterson. And they took every opportunity to make their point. Once, at a dinner in Paris, a diminutive Frenchman (in recounting the story, Jefferson described him as “a shrimp”) was enthusiastically preaching the doctrine of American degeneracy. Benjamin Franklin (5-foot-10) sized up the French and American guests, seated on opposite sides of the table, and proposed: “Let us try this question by the fact before us.... Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature has degenerated.” The Frenchmen muttered something about exceptions proving rules.
In Philadelphia, the portrait artist Charles Willson Peale first examined incognitum bones from the Ohio River Valley in 1783, and the encounter set him on what he called an “irresistibly bewitching” quest for knowledge about the natural world, leading him to create what was in effect America’s first national museum. (The Smithsonian Institution was still more than a half-century in the future.) Tickets to Peale’s museum, in Philadelphia, bore the slogan “The Birds & Beasts will teach thee,” and he saw to it that they taught lessons in the greatness of the American republic.
For Peale, the massive size of the incognitum made it the perfect answer to Buffon’s “ridiculous idea,” and in 1801 he got word of “an animal of uncommon magnitude” discovered by a farmer named John Masten in the Hudson River Valley near Newburgh, New York. That June, Peale traveled by stagecoach and sloop from Philadelphia to Newburgh, where he paid $200—roughly $2,500 in today’s currency—for the bones, plus $100 more to do additional digging on his own. Before long, he had a $500 loan from the American Philosophical Society, a science and natural history organization of which Jefferson was then president, to support an ambitious effort to excavate bones from a pond on Masten’s farm.
Peale commemorated the scene in a famous painting, with lightning crackling down from a black corner of the sky and horses panicking in the distance. To drain the pond that dominates the scene, Peale had devised a huge wooden wheel on a high bank, with men treading inside like hamsters in an exercise wheel. The turning of the wheel drove a long conveyor belt of buckets, each carrying water up and over, to spill down a chute into a nearby vale. Workers on staged platforms passed dirt up from the exposed bottom of the pond. In the lower right quadrant of the painting, Peale himself presided, grandly presenting the scene with one outstretched arm.
The painting was originally titled Exhuming the Mammoth, but the excavation at the pond actually recovered only a few more bones to add to Masten’s original discovery. Peale did better with two less picturesque excavations up the road, recovering a nearly complete skeleton. But the painting made for a shrewd piece of self-promotion.
Back in Philadelphia, making sense of the bones took three months and “numberless trials of putting first one piece, then another, together, and turning them in every direction.” Peale’s slave Moses Williams did much of the work. He “fitted pieces together by trying, [not] the most probable, but the most improbable position, as the lookers-on believed,” Peale wrote. “Yet he did more good in that way than any one among those employed in the work.” Peale filled in missing parts in papier-mâché and wood, scrupulously indicating these substitutions. But the showman or patriot in him exaggerated the size of his incognitum slightly, yielding a skeleton 11 feet high at the shoulder. Later, he corked the joints, adding extra “cartilage” to make it even bigger. For a time, he also pointed the tusks downward, the better for skewering prey.
To drum up business for the opening of his museum, Peale had Williams put on an Indian headdress and parade through the city streets on a white horse, with trumpet fanfare. Fliers invoked an Indian legend: “TEN THOUSAND MOONS AGO” a creature had roamed “the gloomy forests...huge as the frowning Precipice, cruel as the bloody Panther.” For 50 cents additional admission to the museum’s “Mammoth Room,” Philadelphians could see “the LARGEST of Terrestrial Beings!” with their own wide eyes.
It was only the world’s second reconstruction of a fossil species (the one prior attempt being a decidedly less thrilling giant ground sloth in Madrid), and it became a national sensation, with word spreading until “the masses of the people were now even more eager than the scientists to view the great American wonder,” according to Peale biographer (and descendant) Charles Coleman Sellers. “The mere idea of bigness stirred every heart.” Peale’s “mammoth” would turn out to be a mastodon, but “mammoth” was the word on every tongue, gaining overnight “a fresh and spectacular currency.” A Philadelphia baker offered “Mammoth Bread.” In Washington, a man who proclaimed himself a “Mammoth Eater” dispatched 42 eggs in ten minutes, and a New Yorker grew a 20-pound “mammoth” radish. Knowing of President Thomas Jefferson’s long interest in all things mammoth, the women of Cheshire, Massachusetts, presented him with a 1,230-pound “Mammoth Cheese” on New Year’s Day 1802.
Politics also infected a publicity stunt staged by Peale’s son Rembrandt. Thirteen gentlemen sat at a round table beneath the “mammoth’s” monstrous rib cage while a musician played “Jefferson’s March” and “Yankee Doodle” at a piano tucked under the pelvis. The diners offered patriotic toasts, being careful not to raise their glasses too high: “The American People: may they be as preeminent among the nations of the earth, as the canopy we sit beneath surpasses the fabric of the mouse!” Young Peale soon boarded a ship with the second skeleton from the Hudson River Valley to show off in Europe.
Caught up in the effort to prove the vitality of the American experiment, Thomas Jefferson had convinced himself by the 1780s that the mammoth still lived. He gave credence to an Indian legend about a mammoth that shook off lightning bolts, bounding away over the Ohio River to somewhere beyond the Great Lakes. “In the present interior of our continent,” Jefferson wrote, “there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions.” He imagined this pair of American titans roaming the Great Plains.
Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy was still on Jefferson’s mind years later, when, as president, he sent Lewis and Clark to explore the American West—partly to see if they could turn up a living mammoth. He was so obsessed with this quest that he once laid out a collection of mastodon and other bones on the floor of the East Room in the White House, where John and Abigail Adams’ laundry had once hung.
So, how could one get the United States (with a PoD at any point in US history) to embrace the mammoth as the symbol of American might and endurance, rather than the Eagle?
