Sherry Chandler

Another glimpse of George Washington

Late in 1780, a workman dug up some big molars on Robert Annan’s farm in New York. A few miles away at West Point, General George Washington was encamped with the Continental army and on one December day he and some fellow officers decided to take a sleigh ride over to get a look at this find.

As Stanley Hedeen reports it in Big Bone Lick (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2008), Annan describes the visit like this:

His Excellency General Washington came to my house to see these relicts. He told me, he had in his house a grinder which was found on the Ohio, much resembling these.

This rather terse account was enhanced by that of Washington’s aide-de-camp, Colonel David Humphreys:

he recounted that Washington had told the story of a man who had observed the extraction of molars from an incognitum skull at Big Bone Lick: “when they raised up the Head out of which they took the Teeth, …it reached up to the middle of his Face.”

I’m more than a little pained, reading these accounts, by the casual way these guys dug up these “relicts” and carted them away. Not only did they make their way back to the East Coast, so that Washington had a tooth and Jefferson had some samples, but they also found their way to England and to France. Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and these guys had no concept of evolution. Some thought the bones those of a giant human, others that it was some huge carnivore made extinct by Noah’s flood.

That the molars looked like those of a carnivore — having according to Annan

protruberances, rising in a pyramidical form, the perpendicular height of the highest of which was about an inch and one tenth

—confused these early scholars and curio collectors. Because they also found huge tusks at Big Bone Lick, many people argued that this creature was some big elephant but the molars were not at all like those of an elephant. Okay, they said, the tusks are from elephants and the molars are from hippopotami. But, said others, both elephants and hippopotami are tropical animals.

Then once upon a time the climate must have been much warmer here.

Still others thought that once they explored further on this continent, they were bound to find these giants, be they humans or elephants.

It took Thomas Jefferson to ask the obvious question:

Wherever these grinders are found, there also we find the tusks and skeleton; but no skeleton of the hippopotamus nor grinders of the elephant. It will not be said that the hippopotamus and elephant came always to the same spot, the former to deposit his grinders, and the latter his tusks and skeleton. For what became of the parts not deposited there? we must agree then that these remains belong to each other, that they are of one and the same animal, that this was not a hippopotamus, because the hippopotamus had no tusks nor such a frame, and because the grinders differ in their size as well as the number and form of their points. That it was not an elephant, I think ascertained by proofs equally decisive.

Similar skeletons having recently been found in Siberia, Jefferson posited a “cold-adapted, elephant-like animal with a circumpolar distribution,” a Wooly Mammoth.

By 1783, George Rogers Clark writes to Jefferson that all the fossil pieces that were lying around at Big Bone Lick had been carried away.

So popular was this idea of the Mammoth that it became a patriotic rallying cry for the young nation:

In contrast to the European nations that perceived their cultural legacy in the classical ruins of Greece and Rome, American nationalism soon came to be expressed by the relics of the mammoth in the New World’s unspoiled landscape …an early icon of American patriotism.

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