Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 2 32 * * * Over on our supposedly sickly little continent in 1705, a Dutch farmer in New York uncovered a large grinding tooth on his land. The farmer sold it for a pint of rum and the tooth soon made the rounds, confounding everyone. The most prevalent explanation was that it was the molar from a giant prehistoric man. By 1801, when a nearly complete skeleton of one of the creatures was found, it became clear that the creature represented was an American mastodon. Europeans had come in contact with mammoths for cen- turies, even misidentifying their tusks as unicorn horns and grinding them up for presumed medicinal properties. They had only begun to enter the consciousness of naturalists fair- ly recently, who struggled to account for the bones. Even into the first half of the 19th century, the prevailing model of the universe was that of a "great chain of being," with God at the top, humans just below Him, followed by everything else. Also en vogue among the intellectuals of the period, includ- ing Thomas Jefferson, was the idea of "deism," the belief in a God who created and set the universe in motion before more or less leaving it to do its thing, not unlike a Swiss watch. Thomas Jefferson, therefore, could not feature the idea of extinction. Surely every animal that had ever lived on the earth lived still, as nature must have been created in perfect, unchanging harmony. In other words, the American mast- odon, that enormous and terrifying "incognitum," as it was then known, must still be alive out there. Nor was he entirely without reason to think so, as a 1782 letter to Jefferson from a Major Arthur Campbell reveals. In the letter, Campbell reports on the experiences of a "certain Mr. Stanley" who was captured by Indians and "was at length carried over Mountains west of the Missouri, to a River that runs Westwardly," and "that the natives told him there were animals in the Country which from the description he judges to be Elephants." To the young Jefferson, this was a very exciting notion, and no doubt he had it in mind later, as a young nation pre- pared to explore the Louisiana Purchase. It probably won't surprise you to hear that Lewis and Clark, for all of their incredible adventures, encountered nary a mastodon. It's probably fair to say they were glad of that. Jefferson must have been disappointed, but it didn't blunt the statesman's obsession with fossils. According to witness- es, Jefferson would sometimes lay out all of his mammoth bones on the floor of the White House and examine them. And in 1807, not long after the conclusion of the expedi- tion, Jefferson sent Captain William Clark on another mam- moth-related trip, this time to Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, famous for its wealth of tusks and teeth. But what they had seen on their journey—moose as tall as carriages, grizzly bears who shrugged off lead, and of course oceans of American bison—would put the theory of Ameri- can degeneracy to bed for good. No one could maintain that our animals were in any way weaker, smaller, or less devel- oped. Buffon, however, doesn't seem to have rescinded his argument about the inferiority of American animals, though Jefferson did ship him a rotting American moose carcass with the wrong antlers attached. And Jefferson, for his part, never Europeans had come into contact with mammoths FOR CENTURIES, EVEN MISIDENTIFYING THEIR TUSKS AS UNICORN HORNS.

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