According to Dr. Barton, in 1761 there were found by Indians in this country five huge carcasses with long noses above their mouths; but this lacks satisfactory proof. In some of the ancient carvings in Mexico and Yucatan, especially those at Palenque, representations of an elephant’s head are to be seen; and it is assumed that the artists must have been acquainted with the animals, or have had some tradition concerning them. Mr. Latrobe relates that “near the city of Tezcuco, one of the ancient roads or causeways was discovered; and on one side, only three feet below the surface, in what may have been the ditch of the road, there lay the entire skeleton of a mastodon. It bore every appearance of having been coeval with the period when the road was used.” An old Mexican hieroglyphic represents a sacrificing priest with head covered with a casque, in which the head of an animal bearing a striking resemblance to the elephant may be seen. The trunk is too distinct and plain to be an accidental resemblance; and the artist did not have the tapir in view when he produced it, the head being decidedly elephantine.

Professor Holmes found the bones of the mastodon associated with pottery on the banks of the Ashley River, near Charleston, S.C.; and, in the majority of these cases, the mastodon’s remains were discovered very near the surface. Professor Winchell states that he has himself “seen the bones of the mastodon and elephant embedded in peat, at depths so shallow that he could readily believe the animals to have occupied the country during its possession by the Indians.” The so-called elephant-mound, referred to in these pages, is considered by some as evidence that the mastodon was a familiar form to the early American; so with the Indian pipes ([Plate XVIII.]). If they are intended to represent elephants, which one can hardly doubt, the maker must either have seen the mastodon, or have had it accurately described to him. Quite recently some tracks, presumably those of the mastodon or elephant, have been discovered on the surface of a sandstone quarry at Carson City, in Nevada. They represent a series of circular depressions from three to six inches in depth, each about twenty inches in diameter, which, according to the method of measuring the height of elephants in India, would give an elephant ten feet high. The impressions have been traced for forty feet, and show distinct footprints giving a stride of about five feet eight inches.

The largest find ever made in this country, with the exception perhaps of the vast collection at the Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, was that at Warren, N.J., in 1845, where no less than six almost perfect skeletons were found six feet below the surface. A farmer discovered them while digging out mud from a small swamp; and, as most of the huge creatures were standing upright, it is evident that they became mired in the bog, and slowly sank into it. We can imagine the scene when these six monsters were entrapped,—their trumpeting, their roars of rage and fear, their mighty struggles to escape, that, with their combined weight, only served to mire them deeper and deeper, until they finally disappeared, to remain entombed for untold ages, and to be finally found, and placed in our museums and halls of science as monuments of a lost race.

Nearly all the mastodons are found in swamps, showing that possibly these morasses appeared to be veritable traps that hastened the extinction of these monarchs of the forest. This may be considered the popular theory of one method by which mastodons were destroyed: but there is no better authority than Professor James Hall, the present geologist in chief of the State of New York; and his opinions are entirely different. His views are, that the extinction of the mastodon was hastened by the glacial period, and that most of the remains discovered have been dropped in hollows or ponds, from the ice perhaps, and the peat formed over them. He advances in favor of this the fact that several tusks have been discovered which show evidences of glacial action. There is such a tusk in the collection of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, worn by supposed glacial action; and Rutgers College has the extremity of a tusk, showing what is considered by Professor Hall to be glacial striæ.

Referring to the Big Bone Lick, Professor Hall says, “With our present knowledge, it would appear that this accumulation of bones, teeth, and tusks of mastodon, in Kentucky, may have been caused by the melting of a glacier in which they had become embedded, and, being gradually pushed forward to its southern limit, had been deposited in this place. There are other similar localities of less importance and extent, where mastodon remains have been obtained in considerable numbers; and it is not improbable that a critical examination of all known collections may furnish some further evidence of conditions similar to those indicated by the specimens in the Museums of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and of Rutgers College.

“However heterodox these views may appear, as opposed to the generally received opinions of the age and relations of the mastodon, I feel quite sure that some other hypothesis than the one usually entertained must be adopted in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of the mode and conditions of distribution and inhumation of the mastodon and fossil elephant remains of this country.

“In advocating this opinion regarding the extermination of the mastodon, I have reference to the remains as they have come under my own observation: and I do not mean to be understood as opposing in toto, the views so generally entertained, that the mastodon has existed during the present epoch; or that the opinion held by some of our scientists, that the animal may have existed both before and since the glacial period, is untenable. I refer only to the phenomena usually accompanying these remains, and the conditions attending those which have been exhumed within the State of New York and adjacent parts of New Jersey, and to some extent in other parts of the country. The locality of Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, which has furnished the fragmentary parts of so many skeletons (and some other Western localities), I have not visited; but the evidence already given in relation to the bones from this place, indicates very clearly that they had suffered from glacial action; and the animals were, as we infer, of the glacial period.”

On the great Osage River, the mastodons were sunk in the mud in a vertical position. Perhaps the most interesting find in New-York State was what is known as the Cohoes mastodon. In the fall of 1866 a number of workmen were employed in excavating the foundation for the Harmony Mills Company, in Cohoes; and after much labor, during which several thousand loads of muck or peaty soil, and old trunks of trees, had been removed, one of the men discovered the jaw-bone of some gigantic animal. The bone was found almost at the water-level, and at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface; the entire locality being clay and earth, which formerly had been filled in to cover a swampy depression.

The report of the find was conveyed to Professor James Hall, who immediately undertook the superintendence of the search. He soon saw that the locality had at one time been the bed of the river, and that the remains were evidently in a vast pot-hole,—a circular pit often seen in the rock-borders of rivers at the present day. The discovery of the jaw pointed to the assumption that the entire skeleton could not be far off, and careful search was immediately commenced. Loads of refuse, old trunks of trees showing the imprint of beavers’ teeth, broken slate, water-worn pebbles, were removed, and finally, in the bottom of the great pot-hole, upon a mass of material similar to that which had been taken out, covered with river-ooze and vegetable soil, the principal parts of the great mastodon were found. First, the bones of the hind-legs appeared, and a portion of the pelvis; and against the sloping wall reclined the massive head with tusks complete, unbroken and undisturbed; then followed many of the other portions of the skeleton, all lodged in a pot-hole of great depth. Sixty feet were explored without finding bottom; and the supposition was, that the animal had in some way been caught in a glacier, and gradually melted out as the great mass of ice slowly moved down over the face of the country, dropping it into this natural tomb. This complete skeleton ([Plate V.]) was presented to the cabinet of the State Museum at Albany, and is now on exhibition there, one of the finest specimens in existence. Its dimensions are as follows:—

FT.IN.
Length in a direct line143
Length following the curve of the spinal column206
Width of the thorax at the seventh rib35½
Elevation of the crest of the scapula84
Elevation of the crest of the pelvis84
Elevation of the head811
Elevation of the spine of the second dorsal vertebra810
Elevation of the spine of the eighth dorsal vertebra93