Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

Myths and Mammoths

The subject has been thoroughly confused by too many guesses and too little evidence. Besides a great variety of geologic theories and some amazingly stubborn conservatism, we have had some extraordinary Indian myths as well as the dreams of innocents and eccentrics.

If the Spanish churchmen were a bit upset at finding in the Indies both a new world and a race unaccounted for in the Bible, later explorers and settlers of the mainland were quite as astonished over the discovery of huge bones in swamps and creeks, prairies and badlands. Laymen and divines sought explanations, and of course they found dozens, most of them as absurd as Cotton Mather’s dictum of 1712 that the bones were those of the giants of Holy Writ. By 1782 Thomas Jefferson knew they belonged to a kind of elephant, but on “the traditional testimony of the Indians” he was inclined to believe “that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America.... He may as well exist there now as he did formerly where we find his bones.”[1]

The bridge from sacred fiction to profane fact, from giants to mammoths and mastodons, seems to have been the work, oddly enough, of Negro slaves. Mark Catesby wrote in 1743:

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 that could be no other; I having seen some of the like that are brought from Africa.[2]

On the basis of this statement Loren C. Eiseley—who has written much on the problem of the extinction of American mammals—believes that the Negro slaves told the Indian as well as the white man about the animal that had such gigantic bones, and described its shape and habits.

The eighteenth-century white man—eager for knowledge of zoology and many other things—pumped the Indian, and doubtless with leading questions. The Indians, “involved in their own vast animal mythology,” as Eiseley puts it, were likely to respond “to these myriads of questions with elaboration and a desire to please.”[3] Thus, when our ancestors asked where the elephants had gone, the Indians answered, “Across the lakes.” Soon the belief that the mammoth still lived in the remoter portions of northeastern Canada grew so strong in white men that early maps indicated his home in western Labrador. By the time that the ethnologists of the last half-century began collecting Indian myths there were numerous traditions of the elephant in the native folklore. In a summary of the material Duncan Strong lists more than a dozen instances.[4] An Algonquin tribe told of a great animal “with an arm coming out of its shoulder,” and of another that left “large round tracks in the snow” and “struck its enemies with its long nose.” Penobscot Indians had a myth in which a culture hero saw “moving hills without vegetation,” which proved to be “great animals with long teeth, animals so huge that when they lay down they could not get up.” There were stories of “a great moose with a fifth leg.” Elephant myths turned up among the Alabama Indians in the South. The Chitimacha said: “A long time ago a being with a long nose came out of the ocean and began to kill people. It would root up trees with its nose to get at people who sought refuge in the branches.” The Eskimos of Alaska joined their Siberian brothers in tales of a behemoth that burrowed underground and died if he breathed air—a tale derived, no doubt, from the carcasses of mammoths found frozen under the snow. “These stories,” writes Eiseley, “show a suspicious growth in numbers just at the time when White interest and enthusiasm were keenest.”[5]

Whatever germ of truth may lie in some of the Indian traditions, certain theorists of the last century and a half were quite as absurd as Cotton Mather in their conclusions. In 1806 an Englishman named Thomas Ashe wrote of “incognita, nondescript animals” of the Middle West, and suggested that “as the immense volume of the creature would unfit him for coursing after his prey through thickets and woods,” nature had “furnished him with the power of taking a mighty leap.”[6] Then there was John Ranking, who published in 1827 Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, in the Thirteenth Century, by the Mongols, Accompanied with Elephants. Perhaps he was religious enough to believe, like Jefferson, that “no instance can be produced, of her [nature] having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct.”[7] At any rate, Ranking remembered the “divine wind” that balked Kubla Khan’s invasion of Japan, and he allowed it to blow some of Kubla’s vessels to the New World. A son of the Khan became the first Inca, another Mongol noble founded Montezuma’s line, and the Khan’s elephants of war spread all up and down the two continents—a notion reported in 1778 by Johann R. Forster.[8]

In 1880, worried over how the Mound Builders could have transported so much earth, Frederick Larkin suggested that the Indians must have domesticated the mammoth: “We can imagine that tremendous teams have been driven to and fro in the vicinity of their great works.” As evidence he offered a “copper relic” with an elephant engraved on it “in harness.”[9]