Man and the Glacial Period

by G. Frederick Wright

In view of the grossly erroneous statements made by Mr. McGee concerning the Nampa image (described on [pages 298, 299]), it is necessary for me to speak somewhat more fully of this important discovery. The details concerning the evidence were drawn out by me at length in two communications to the Boston Society of Natural History (referred to on [page 297]), which fill more than thirty pages of closely printed matter, while two or three years before the appearance of the volume the facts had been widely published in the New York Independent, the Scientific American, The Nation, Scribner’s Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly, and in Washington at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in 1890. In the second communication to the Boston Society of Natural History an account was given of a personal visit to the Snake River Valley, largely for the purpose of further investigation of the evidence brought to my notice by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, and of the conditions under which the figurine was found. Among the most important results of this investigation was the discovery of numerous shells under the lava deposits, which Mr. Dall, of the United States Geological Survey, identified for me as either post-Tertiary or late Pliocene; thus throwing the superficial lava deposits of the region into the Quaternary period, and removing from the evidence the antecedent improbability which would bear so heavily against it if we were compelled to suppose that the lava of the Snake River region was all of Tertiary or even of early Quaternary age. Furthermore, the evidence of the occurrence of a great débâcle in the Snake River Valley during the Glacial period, incident upon the bursting of the banks of Lake Bonneville, goes far to remove antecedent presumptions against the occurrence of human implements in such conditions as those existing at Nampa (see below, [pp. 233-237]).

Mr. McGee’s misunderstanding of the evidence on one point is so gross, that I must make special reference to it. He says[AB] that this image “is alleged to have been pounded out of volcanic tuff by a heavy drill, ... under a thick Tertiary lava bed.” The statement of facts on [page 298] bears no resemblance to this representation. It is there stated that there were but fifteen feet of lava, and that near the surface; that below this there was nothing but alternating beds of clay and quicksand, and that the lava is post-Tertiary. The sand-pump I should perhaps have described more fully in the book, as I had already done in the communication to the Boston Society of Natural History. It was a tube eight feet long, with a valve at the bottom three and a half inches in diameter on the inside. Through this it was the easiest thing in the world for the object, which is only one inch and a half long, to be brought up in the quicksand without injury.

[AB] Literary Northwest, vol. ii, p. 275.

The baseless assertions of Mr. McGee, involving the honesty of Messrs. Kurtz and Duffes, are even less fortunate and far more reprehensible. “It is a fact,” says Mr. McGee, “hat one of the best-known geologists of the world chanced to visit Nampa while the boring was in progress, and the figurine and the pretty fiction were laid before him. He recognized the figurine as a toy such as the neighbouring Indians give their children, and laughed at the story; whereupon the owner of the object enjoined secrecy, pleading: ‘Don’t give me away; I’ve fooled a lot of fellows already, and I’d like to fool some more.’”[AC] This well-known geologist, on being challenged by Professor Claypole[AD] to give “a full, exact, and certified statement of the conversation” above referred to, proved to be Major Powell, who responded with the following statement: “In the fall of 1889 the writer visited Boise City, in Idaho [twenty miles from Nampa]. While stopping at a hotel, some gentlemen called on him to show him a figurine which they said they had found in sinking an artesian well in the neighbourhood, at a depth, if I remember rightly, of more than three hundred feet.... When this story was told the writer, he simply jested with those who claimed to have found it. He had known the Indians that live in the neighbourhood, had seen their children play with just such figurines, and had no doubt that the little image had lately belonged to some Indian child, and said the same. While stopping at the hotel different persons spoke about it, and it was always passed off as a jest; and various comments were made about it by various people, some of them claiming that it had given them much sport, and that a good many tenderfeet had looked at it, and believed it to be genuine; and they seemed rather pleased that I had detected the hoax.”[AE]

[AC] American Anthropologist, vol. vi, p. 94: repeated by Mr. McGee in the Literary Northwest, vol. ii, p. 276.

[AD] The Popular Science Monthly, vol. xlii, p. 773.

[AE] Ibid., vol. xliii, pp. 322, 323.

Thus it appears that Major Powell has made no such statement, at least in public, as Mr. McGee attributes to him. It should be said, also, that Major Powell’s memory is very much at fault when he affirms that there is a close resemblance between this figurine and some of the children’s playthings among the Pocatello Indians. On the contrary, it would have been even more of a surprise to find it in the hands of these children than to find it among the prehistoric deposits on the Pacific coast.

To most well-informed people it is sufficient to know that no less high authorities than Mr. Charles Francis Adams and Mr. G. M. Gumming, General Manager for the Union Pacific line for that district, carefully investigated the evidence at the time of the discovery, and, knowing the parties, were entirely satisfied with its sufficiency. It was also subjected to careful examination by Professor F. W. Putnam, who discerned, in a deposit of an oxide of iron on various parts of the image, indubitable evidence that it was a relic which had lain for a long time in some such condition as was assigned to it in the bottom of the well—all of which is detailed in the papers referred to below, on [page 297].

Finally, the discovery, both in its character and conditions, is in so many respects analogous to those made under Table Mountain, near Sonora, Cal. (described on pages [294-297]), that the evidence of one locality adds cumulative force to that of the other. The strata underneath the lava in which these objects were found are all indirectly, but pretty certainly, connected with the Glacial period.[AF] No student of glacial archæology, therefore, can hereafter afford to disregard these facts from the Pacific coast.