No one was sure what living mammoths would be like, but many citizens believed they could be dangerous carnivores. Historical record reveals that he instructed Lewis to look not only for bones, but for living “mammoths” in the unexplored western territories. An avid collector of its bones, Jefferson no doubt informed Lewis of his own belief the animal was not extinct. While in the city Lewis almost certainly visited Peale’s Museum and viewed the skeleton of the incognitum. As early-nineteenth-century Americans set out to conquer the western wilderness, this mythical creature helped them imagine themselves as new rulers of the natural world.īefore Meriwether Lewis left for the West in 1803, President Jefferson sent him to Philadelphia to receive advice from the nation’s leading naturalists about scientific aspects of his expedition. Fortunately, Peale’s skeleton provides us with valuable insights into the historical roots of this extravagant metaphor and the paradigm of dominance that the myth of the mastodon helped to create. Evidently, we have a powerful desire to portray fearsome beasts of prey as rulers of prehistoric nature. Newscasters, novelists, filmmakers, and scientists alike routinely tell us that dinosaurs “ruled” the earth for 150 million years, even though the metaphor of ruling species has no scientific basis. In many respects, Peale’s American monster embodied a natural history myth that still exists today: the belief that monstrous carnivores actually “ruled” prehistoric nature, as if they were ruthless tyrants. The story of Peale’s skeleton demonstrates why such curiosities should not be dismissed as Barnumesque aberrations. Rather than dismissing the wrongly mounted tusks as quack science, we need to delve deeper into the hidden meaning of this misbegotten monster. As a result, few people today are aware that the mastodon was the nation’s first prehistoric monster, or that the Founding Fathers made this animal a symbol of dominance in the first decades of the new republic. Historians seem to regard it as an embarrassing lapse in the enlightened rationality of the Peales, not to mention the Founding Fathers who helped to create the myth of the mastodon. Unfortunately, this image of the skeleton with its downturned tusks has become an obscure footnote in the abundant literature now available on Charles Willson Peale and his remarkable family. Many patrons of his museum imagined the unknown creature to be a ferocious carnivore, an elephant with claws that devoured buffalo, deer, and elk. Indeed, while Lewis and Clark were exploring the western wilderness, Peale had remounted his skeleton with its tusks pointing downward to magnify its ferocity (fig. While the mastodon did not compete with the bald eagle as the nation’s official emblem, this majestic Ice Age creature did become an informal icon of national identity for citizens of the new republic. For them the animal’s symbolic meaning far outweighed its scientific significance as evidence of extinct species or a prehuman past. For many Americans, the great beast had become a symbol of the new nation’s own conquering spirit–an emblem of overwhelming power in a psychologically insecure society. The skeleton preoccupied American patriots for another reason less scientific in nature–one which helps to explain why its bones were eagerly sought after by the Founding Fathers during and after the Revolutionary War. What was this enormous animal for which no living counterpart could be found? Was it a harmless herbivore or a ferocious carnivore? Were its descendants still living in the unexplored parts of the American West? Or did its remains belong to an extinct species whose disappearance was God’s blessing upon the new nation? Naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic had puzzled over the bones ever since the first discovery of a giant tooth on the banks of the Hudson River in the early eighteenth century. In an era when there was little awareness of extinction or the prehuman past, the animal’s identity had been a subject of vigorous debate for nearly a century in both Europe and America. Édouard de Montulé’s drawing of Peale’s mastodon skeleton, 1816Įxcavated by Peale from a farm in the Hudson River Valley in 1801, the skeleton belonged then to an unknown species, later identified as the mastodon.
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