In the spring of 1872, eight years after the discovery of the famous
mammoth carving in the cave of La Madeleine, Perigord, France, Barnard
Hansell, a young farmer, while ploughing on his father's farm, four
miles and a half east of Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, saw,
to use his own words, a "queer stone" lying on the surface of the
ground, and close to the edge of the new furrow. The plough had just
missed turning it under. He stopped and picked it up; it was the larger
piece of the fractured "gorget stone," in fig. 1, (frontispiece). By
wetting his thumb and rubbing it he could see strange lines and a
carving representing an animal like an elephant, but without troubling
his boyish head much about it, he carried it several days in his
pocket, and finally locked it up in his chest, where, along with his
other relics, arrow-heads, spear-points, axes, and broken banner
stones, thrown in from time to time as he found them on the farm,
it remained until the spring of 1881, when he sold it to Mr. Henry
Paxon, son of a well-known resident of the neighborhood, then a youth
of nineteen, and with a fancy for collecting Indian antiquities, in
whose possession it still remains.[A] At the moment of the purchase no
particular attention had been paid to the carvings, and the new owner
was not certain that he had noticed the mammoth while at Hansell's
house, or until a few hours later, when he had brought home his
trophies and shown them to his father, who distinctly remembers calling
his son's attention to the rude outline of an elephant upon the stone.
But without doubt the singular part of the story is the unexpected
finding of the smaller piece of the fractured stone a few months later.
After many ineffectual searches for it in the intervening years, it was
picked up by Hansell while corn-husking with his brother in the same
field and at the same spot where nine years before the first piece had
been found. This luckily discovered fragment Hansell presented to Mr.
Paxon. Several persons of the neighborhood had seen the stone at Mr.
Paxon's house both before and after the discovery of the second piece,
but it was not until both parts had been some months in his possession
that any unusual interest was attached to it even by him.
Some time in July, 1882, Captain J. S. Bailey, of the Bucks County
Historical Society, to whom the writer in preparing the present article
must acknowledge his great indebtedness, and who first called serious
attention to the archæological value of the stone, made it the subject
of a paper read before the Society, but since that time, although
displayed at a county exhibition and twice shown at meetings of the
Society above mentioned, this remarkable relic has remained unheard of.
This is the simple story of most great archæological discoveries;
no "man of science" was at hand to analyze the condition of the
surrounding soil, or satisfy himself that a fraud had not been
committed, and a hundred questions now arise as to the finder of the
stone, and its present owner, its long unrecognized importance, the
whereabouts of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, etc., etc. The "modern
scientist" will by no means be satisfied with such evidence as would
be held sufficient in a court of law, and every fraud that has been
perpetrated upon the lover of Indian relics adds to the necessity of
carefully examining each detail of the discovery--nothing must be
believed except upon the strongest evidence.
For a full discussion of this evidence the reader is referred to the
appendix.
Several circumstances seem to concur in adding to the novelty of
the discovery. In the first place the carving has been made upon
one of the so-called "gorget stones," than which no class of Indian
relics have been more puzzling to archæologists. Our museums are
well-supplied with these mysterious perforated tablets of slate,
generally resembling in size and shape the stone represented in fig.
1, and which are found in all parts of the United States. Ornaments,
talismans, breastplates, or buttons, as we may choose to call them,
they seem to have been the peculiar property of the North American
Indian, without a counterpart, as far as the writer can learn, in
the stone implements of other uncivilized races. They seem often to
have been buried with the dead warrior and when discovered in Indian
graves are generally close to the breast of the skeleton.[B] Gorgets
are frequently scratched and scribbled upon, and ornamental zig-zags
and cross-lines, like the faint scratches plainly to be seen on the
Lenape stone crossing the carvings in all directions, are not uncommon
on these stones, pipes, banner stones, and other Indian implements;
but picture-writings proper, such as are commonly found painted upon
buffalo robes, scratched upon birch bark, or carved upon the face of
cliffs or large boulders, are exceedingly rare on small stones, and the
tablet in question is the only known instance, the writer believes, of
a pictured gorget. The carving, when compared with the larger and more
conventional Muzzinabiks or rock-writings and birch-bark records of the
Indians, seems to lack much of the symbolic obscurity common to these
productions of the prophets and medicine men. It doubtless belongs
to the less hieratic class of writings, known among the Algonkins as
"Kekeewin," which dealt with things generally understood by the tribe.
It is unquestionably a picture of a combat between savages and the
hairy mammoth--an encounter such as our imagination has not yet
connected with the ancient forests of America, and drawn as well as an
Indian who had seen the great monster could have drawn it. Most of the
figures seem represented according to the common conventional method
of the modern Indians, yet there is certainly a seeming picturesque
relation between them of which we can find no example in the few
ancient Indian pictographs which have been preserved to us. We can
almost fancy a foreground, a distance, and a faint chiaro-oscuro.
The combat we might imagine takes place on the confines of a forest,
and if we may judge from an upward inclination of the foreground on
the right, at the base of a hillside. The monster, angry, and with
erect tail, approaches the forest, in which, through the pine trunks,
are seen the wigwams of an Indian village. In the sky overhead, and as
if presiding over the event, are ranged the powers of heaven: forked
lightning flashes through the tree-tops, and from between a planet
and the crescent moon, beyond which we seem to see a constellation
(represented by a series of crossed lines) and two stars, the sun's
face looks down upon the scene. Four human forms confront the monster,
the first holds in his right hand a bow from which the arrow just
discharged is sticking in the side of the enraged beast, and in his
left, if it is not planted in the ground, a long lance; a second
warrior with head-dress of feathers stands farther to the right; and
still farther, and near what may perhaps be called a rock, a third sits
upon the ground apparently smoking a pipe. A fourth figure is easily
distinguishable trampled under the fore feet of the mammoth.
The strong effect upon the fancy of the rude carving, as we gaze
upon it, would be hard indeed to resist. Its stern naïveté and
characteristic lack of æsthetic purpose bring upon the mind a haunting
sense of the reality of the event it represents, and our sympathies
seem genuinely awakened for the four human beings who have dared to
confront the monster with their rude weapons of stone, yet whose
destiny, like that of their huge antagonist, is overshadowed by the
near presence of a supernatural power, seen in the great phenomena of
nature which the artist has connected with the scene. Well might the
appearance of the hairy mammoth have excited in the superstitious mind
of the Indian hunter fancies more wild than those contained in the
carving. Hardly more thrilling could have been the coming of the white
men in ships, or the sound of their cannon, than the sight of one of
these ungainly monsters in the shadows of a primeval forest, or the
crash of his irresistible advance through the underbrush.
* * * "dat euntibus ingens
Silva locum et magno cedunt virgulta fragore."
Beckendorff, a Russian engineer, who, in 1846, saw a carcass entire,
"a black, horrible, giant-like mass," floating on one of the rivers
of Siberia, declared that its appearance to that of a modern Indian
elephant was as "that of a coarse ugly dray-horse to an Arab steed." He
also noticed a ridge of stiff hair like a mane about a foot in length
and extending above the shoulders and along the back.
Its size, like that of the modern elephant, must have varied
considerably. The famous St. Petersburg skeleton measures but nine
feet in height, while that in the Royal Museum of Natural History in
Brussels reaches eleven feet, and the animal in the carving, judging
from the relative size of the figures, would have been still larger
than Beckendorff's carcass, which he declares measured thirteen feet
in height. Geology tells us much of the aspect, epoch, habits, and
range of the mammoth; that it had appeared later than the mastodon, and
somewhere in the age known as the Pliocene; that there were several
species--three at least--two of which were inhabitants of America; that
in North America it ranged from Behring Strait to the Gulf of Mexico,
and in Europe from the extremity of Eastern Siberia as far south as
Rome and the Pyrenees; that it fed upon the branches of the fir,
birch, poplar, willow, etc., and was probably migratory in its habits,
wandering toward grazing grounds in the north in summer, and southward
in winter.
The long shaggy hair with which it was clothed, distinguishing it in
appearance from the modern elephant and its smaller contemporary, the
mastodon, was composed of three distinct suits: the longest, rough,
black bristles, about eighteen inches in length; the next, a coat of
finer close-set hair, fawn-colored, from nine to ten inches long; and
the last, a soft, reddish wool, about five inches long, filling up
the interstices between the other hair, and enabling the animal to
withstand an arctic cold.
The enormous tusks measured along the curve from eleven to fifteen
feet, and curved quite abruptly outward and backward.
The massive grinder, sometimes weighing seventeen pounds, was a
conspicuous characteristic; the whole of its surface was not brought
into use at once, but successively, new grinding-points being formed
from behind as the outer and older points wore away.
Several etymologies have been given for the name "mammoth"; among
others, the word "behemoth" in the Book of Job, and the Arabic word
"mehemot," signifying an elephant of very large size. One of the most
interesting is the Tartar word "mamma," meaning the earth, suggested
by Pallas, a Russian scientist, who first gave a description of the
animal. "The Tungooses and Yakoots," he says, "believed that this
animal worked its way in the earth like a mole. The mammoths had
retired, they say, into great caverns from which they never emerge, but
wander to and fro in the galleries; and as they pass into one the roof
of the gallery rises, and the roof of the one just vacated sinks. The
moment this animal sees the light it dies, and the reason why so many
carcasses have been exposed to view is because of their having been
deceived by the irregular conformation of the earth's surface, thus
unintentionally venturing beyond the confines of darkness."[C]
Mastodon and mammoth bones have been discovered in Europe from the
earliest times, and a history of the remarkable theories to which they
had given rise before the time of Cuvier is very interesting. By the
learned of by-gone times the fossils have been mistaken for the bones
of Ajax, the "body of Orestes," unicorns, the teeth of St. Christopher,
and the remains of Hannibal's elephants. The middle ages have given us
a whole library on the subject of a race of giants, whose remains were
clearly recognized in the huge bones.
In America, in colonial times, Governor Dudley, of Massachusetts, was
"perfectly of opinion" that the mastodon tooth discovered near Albany
in 1705 "will agree only to a human body, for whom the flood only could
prepare a funeral; and without doubt he waded as long as he could keep
his head above the clouds, but must at length be confounded with all
other creatures."
At what period the monster became extinct in Europe is a question to
which geology gives no answer from the point of view of human history.
The evidence rests upon the variously computed age of the beds in which
the fossil bones occur. In France, for instance, it is known that the
mammoth, whose bones are found in the strata underlying, and therefore
older than, the Somme Valley peat, became extinct before the peat
stratum, thirty feet thick, which contains no bones, had formed. It had
grown, says M. Boucher de Perthes, at the rate of three inches in a
hundred years; and if, as geologists say, the mammoth bones of Niagara
Falls were deposited in their bed before six miles of the present river
gorge were worn by the cataract out of the solid rock, they may be,
according to Lyell, 31,000, or Desors, 380,000 years old.
In Siberia, whence most of our information comes, many carcasses of
these huge animals have been found preserved entire in the frozen
mud. When and how did they perish? Possibly, says the geologist, all
at once, overwhelmed by some sudden cataclysm, which, burying the
carcasses in the mud, was immediately followed by an intense cold that
has lasted ever since; possibly, again, great freshets in the northern
rivers, overtaking the migrating herds, swept their carcasses from
warmer regions to the shores of the Polar Sea.
In Europe, the fact that the mammoth survived into the human period
was proved some years ago by the discovery of human stone implements
associated with mammoth bones in the river gravels of the Somme Valley,
France, and in the Virgin Cave at Brixham, South Devon, England; but
more interesting still, was the discovery of prehistoric carvings of
the great elephant, sketches from nature made by the "cave-men," and
found in their subterranean dwellings along the river Dordogne in
France, illustrations of which will be given in the following pages.
In America, we have traces of a race of savages as old or older than
the now famous river-drift and cave-men of Europe. Since the "Calaveras
Man" lived, a valley, say geologists, has been metamorphosed, by
the slow processes of nature, into a mountain; and the "San Joachim
plummet," the "Trenton gravel-flints," and stone implements from the
gold-bearing gravels of California, all speak of a race of human beings
who must have lived in the time of the hairy mammoth.
But who were these people? Were they Indians? or had the Indian or his
ancestor the mound-builder not yet appeared? and how many thousands
or tens of thousands of years ago did they exist? These are questions
which archæology has not yet answered.
Here, however, with the carving before us we need not go back so
far, nor beyond the Indian as we know him--the fierce, roving,
bauble-loving, picture-making hunter of to-day. A study of the
wonderful outlines on the stone will lead us through a period of his
history extending over many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years
before the coming of Columbus; and here we may try to read, from the
few vestiges of this time that chance has preserved to us, fragments
of his picturesque mythology, strange legends of his origin and
wanderings over a forest-covered continent, and the thrilling story of
the mound-builders, and of long wars when the forest soil for centuries
was a "dark and bloody ground."[D]
That the mammoth had survived into the time of the Indian can hardly
be doubted. Early travellers had frequently seen its bones at the
"Big-Bone Licks" in Kentucky, whither the huge animals had come, like
the deer and buffalo of modern times, to lick the salt. The great bones
often seemed hardly older than those of the modern animals with which
they were mingled, and, judging from their position along the modern
buffalo-trails through the forest, it seems that the latter animals had
followed the ancient tracks of the mammoth to and from the licks.
Not a few of these early travellers thought it worth their while to
question the Indians about the huge bones and note down their answers.
Jefferson, in his "Notes on Virginia," devotes several pages to the
subject. He even believes the mammoth to be still in existence in his
time in some remote part of the American continent. He tells the story
of a Mr. Stanley, who, "taken prisoner by the Indians near the mouth of
the Tanissee," relates that "after being transferred through several
tribes from one to another, he was at length carried over the mountains
west of the Missouri to a river which runs westwardly; that these
bones abounded there, and that the natives described to him the animal
to which they belonged as still existing in the northern parts of their
country, from which description he judged it to be an elephant."
Further, in support of his theory, he gives an Indian tradition of a
great monster known as the Big Buffalo, and obtained, he says, from a
Delaware chief by one of the governors of Virginia during the American
Revolution. Nothing has seemed more interesting in a study of the
carvings on the Lenape Stone than the remarkable similarity between
this tradition of the Lenni Lenape or Delawares and the carvings on
this relic, discovered in the middle of their ancient territory. The
chief, as the account runs, being asked as to the bones at the Big-Bone
Licks in Kentucky, says that it was a tradition handed down from his
fathers that "in ancient times a herd of these tremendous animals came
to the Big-Bone Licks and began a universal destruction of the bear,
deer, elks, buffaloes, and other animals which had been created for the
use of the Indians. That the Great Man above, looking down and seeing
this, was so enraged that he seized his lightning, descended on the
earth, seated himself on a neighboring mountain, on a rock on which his
seat and the print of his feet are still to be seen, and hurled his
bolts among them till the whole were slaughtered except the big bull,
who, presenting his forehead to the shafts, shook them off as they
fell; but missing one at length, it wounded him in the side, whereon,
springing around, he bounded over the Ohio, over the Wabache, the
Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he is still living at
this day."
Making due allowance for translation, and a reasonable amount of
garbling, the points of similarity between the carving and the
tradition--the great man above (the sun) looking down, the lightning,
and the big bull presenting his forehead to the shafts, and at length
wounded in the side--are very striking; and if we compare the curious
circle enclosing a dot, on the inclined foreground to the right,
with the "neighboring mountain," and the footprint on the rock of
the tradition, the correspondence seems again too unusual for mere
coincidence. On the other hand, the tradition says nothing of warriors
or wigwams, or of planets, moon, and stars, yet these differences may
naturally be accounted for if we suppose the stone older than the
tradition, and that in the latter the local and matter-of-fact elements
of time, place, and human agency would have been the first to fade away
as time went on. But this is not the only Indian tradition of a great
monster--presumably the mammoth--which has been preserved to us.
The element of divine wrath, common to monster myths among barbarous
peoples, again occurs in a Wyandot version of the same tradition,
taken down from a band of Iroquois and Wyandots by Colonel G. Croghan,
at the Salt Licks in Kentucky in 1748, and given in Winterbotham's
"History of the United States," vol. iii., page 139. The head chief,
says the writer, having been flattered with presents of tobacco, paint,
ammunition, etc., on being asked about the large bones, related the
ancient tradition of his people as follows: "That the red man, placed
on this island by the Great Spirit, had been exceedingly happy for
ages, but foolish young people forgetting his rules became ill-tempered
and wicked, in consequence of which the Great Spirit created the Great
Buffalo, the bones of which we now see before us. These made war upon
the human species alone, and destroyed all but a few, who repented and
promised the Great Spirit to live according to his laws if he would
restrain the devouring enemy; whereupon he sent lightning and thunder,
and destroyed the whole race in this spot, two excepted, a male and
female, whom he shut up in yonder mountain, ready to let loose again
should occasion require."
David Cusic, the Tuscarora Indian, in his history of the Iroquois,
among other instances, speaks of the Big Quisquis,[E] a terrible
monster who invaded at an early time the Indian settlements by Lake
Ontario, and was at length driven back by the warriors from several
villages after a severe engagement; and of the Big Elk, another great
beast, who invaded the towns with fury and was at length killed in a
great fight; and Elias Johnson, the Tuscarora chief, in his "History of
the Six Nations," speaks of another monster that appeared at an early
period in the history of his people, "which they called Oyahguaharh,
supposed to be some great mammoth who was furious against men, and
destroyed the lives of many Indian hunters, but who was at length
killed after a long and severe contest."
Another instance of a terrible monster desolating the country of a
certain tribe "with thunder and fire" appears in a collection of
Wyandot traditions published by one William Walker, an Indian agent,
in 1823; and again the great beast appears in the song tradition of
the "Father of Oxen," from Canada, and in a monster tradition from
Louisiana, both spoken of by Fabri, a French officer, in a letter to
Buffon from America in 1748.
"The Reliquæ Aquitanicæ," published by Lartet and Christy, page 60,
quotes a letter from British America of Robert Brown to Professor
Rupert Jones, which speaks of a tradition common to several widely
separated tribes in the Northwest, of lacustrine habitations built by
their ancestors to protect themselves against an animal who ravaged the
country a long time ago.
Hardly less remarkable in its description of the animal than any of the
others is, perhaps, the Great Elk tradition as mentioned by Charlevoix
in his "History of New France."
"There is current among these barbarians," says the author, "a
pleasant-enough tradition of a Great Elk, beside whom all others seem
like ants. He has, they say, legs so high that eight feet of snow does
not embarrass him, his skin is proof against all sorts of weapons, and
he has a sort of arm which comes out of his shoulder and which he uses
as we do ours."
Whatever we may have previously thought of these legends, their
evidence now combined with that of the carving is irresistible. Nothing
but the mammoth itself, surviving into comparatively recent times and
encountered by the Indians, could suffice to account for the carving,
and we can no longer suppose that the size and unusual appearance of
the mammoth bones seen by the Indians in Kentucky could alone have
originated the traditions.
In the carving, we have the most interesting mammoth picture in
existence; not a mere drawing of the animal itself, but a picture
of primitive life, in which the mammoth takes a conspicuous part
in the actions and thoughts of man,--a carving made with a bone or
flint instrument upon a tablet of slate at least four hundred years
ago,--the hairy elephant, drawn in unmistakable outline, and attacked
by human beings,--a battle-scene which thrills our imagination, and
the importance of which the ancient draughtsman magnifies by the
introduction of the symbols of his religion, the sun, moon, and stars,
and the lightning alone powerful to overthrow the great enemy.
All is evidently the work of the Indian; so would he rudely carve
trees, the pine with its straight-spreading arms, like a modern
telegraph pole; his forest wigwam, a simple triangle; the sun, with
human face, and a halo; and the moon, a crescent; the stars were small
crosses, and diverging lines were the rays of light that traversed the
sky from the great luminaries. Men were triangles with their sides
produced, and three dots in the head for eyes, nose, and mouth;
here the minute forms standing their ground before the great beast,
are warriors, with feathers in their hair, and bows and lances in
their hands. The chief figure, the great buffalo, or the great elk of
Charlevoix, armed with a proboscis, as the Indians may well have named
the mammoth, is assailed, as in the Jefferson tradition, by lightning.
Between such a monster, however inoffensive in its habits, and
the Indian hunter, there could be no peace; his size and terrific
appearance were enough for the superstitious fancy of the red man, and
as he browses harmlessly near the village he is attacked; then his
rage transforms him into the fierce enemy and destroyer of mankind
remembered in the traditions. As naively represented in the carving, he
tramples men to a pulp under his feet with the ungovernable fury of a
modern elephant, and overturns whole villages of fragile wigwams, while
his anger perhaps vents itself in loud bellowings; arrows and spears
only annoy him; he must be destroyed by the lightnings of the Great
Spirit to whom the medicine men pray for help.
A remarkable story, alleged in support of the coëxistence of the
Indian, and the mammoth's great contemporary the mastodon, regarded by
most scientists with distrust, though defended by some, was that of
Dr. Albert Koch, a collector of curiosities, who in 1839 disinterred
the skeleton of a mastodon in a clay bed near the Bourboise River,
Gasconade County, Missouri. Associated with the bones Koch claimed
to have discovered, in the presence of a number of witnesses, a layer
of wood-ashes, numerous fragments of rock, "some arrow-heads, a stone
spear-point, and several stone axes," evidencing he claimed, that the
huge animal had met its untimely end at the hands of savages, who,
armed with rude weapons of stone and boulders brought from the bed of
the neighboring river, had attacked it, while helplessly mired in the
soft clay, and finally effected its destruction by fire.
Koch also published with his statement and in connection with another
skeleton, that of the _Mastodon giganteus_ discovered by him in
Benton County, Missouri, a tradition of the Osage Indians, in whose
former territory the bones were found, and which he says led him to
the discovery. It states, says Koch, "that there was a time when
the Indians paddled their canoes over the now extensive prairies of
Missouri and encamped or hunted on the bluffs. That at a certain period
many large and monstrous animals came from the eastward along and up
the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, upon which the animals that had
previously occupied the country became very angry, and at last so
enraged and infuriated by reason of these intrusions, that the red man
durst not venture out to hunt any more, and was consequently reduced
to great distress. At this time a large number of these huge monsters
assembled here, when a terrible battle ensued, in which many on both
sides were killed, and the remnant resumed their march toward the
setting sun. Near the bluffs which are at present known by the name
of the Rocky Ridge one of the greatest of these battles was fought.
Immediately after the battle the Indians gathered together many of
the slaughtered animals and offered them up on the spot as a burnt
sacrifice to the Great Spirit. The remainder were buried by the Great
Spirit himself, in the Pomme de Terre River, which from this time took
the name of the Big-Bone River, as well as the Osage, of which the
Pomme de Terre is a branch. From this time the Indians brought their
yearly sacrifice to this place, and offered it up to the Great Spirit,
as a thank-offering for their great deliverance, and more latterly,
they have offered their sacrifice on the table rock above mentioned (a
curious rock near the spot of the discovery), which was held in great
veneration and considered holy ground."
There is considerable variety of opinion of late, and especially among
persons familiar with the Indians, as to the value of the information
furnished by their traditions; and certainly among Indians to-day the
separation of their pre-Columbian from their later traditions, and
their traditions proper from the extravagant relations so readily dealt
forth by them extempore, is no easy matter. Much stress is laid on the
absence of a tradition of De Soto; yet, as Schoolcraft remarks, the
Delawares and Mohicans had in his time one of Hudson, the Chippeways
of Cartier, and the Iroquois one of a wreck on a sea-coast, and the
extinction of an infant colony, probably Jamestown.
Interest in the American elephant has of late been considerably
increased by the appearance of several supposed representations of the
animal among the relics of our aborigines, drawings of which, and of
the so-called elephant trunks, and head-dresses from the architecture
of Mexico and Central America, are given in the following pages.
Not one of these outlines is unmistakable, and all lack the
characteristic tusks of the mammoth.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Elephant Pipe (Louisa Co., Iowa).]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Elephant Pipe (Louisa Co., Iowa).]
Figures 2 and 3, the now famous "elephant pipes," the authenticity
of which is doubted, however, in the last report of the Bureau
of Ethnology, came to light in Louisa County, Iowa. The former,
discovered in 1872 or 1873, was found, it is said, on the surface
by a farmer while planting corn; and the latter, more interesting
from the scratches upon it evidently intended to represent hair, was
taken from a mound near an old bed of the Mississippi by the Rev. Dr.
Blumer and others on March 2, 1880. The material of the two pipes,
which apparently have been much greased and smoked, is the same--a
light-colored sandstone.
The next of the elephant _documents_ is the so-called elephant mound
of Grant County, Wisconsin, (fig. 4). It was described by Mr. Jared
Warner, of Patch Grove, Wisconsin, on page 416 of the "Smithsonian
Report for 1872," when public attention was first generally called to
it. The effigy, 135 feet long, 60 feet broad, and but 5 feet high, is
situated on the east bank of the Mississippi, just below the mouth of
the Wisconsin, and, says Mr. Warner, has been known in the neighborhood
of Patch Grove for twenty-five years as the "elephant mound." Like
the elephant pipes, however, it lacks the characteristic tusks, and
sceptics claim that its original shape has been too much modified by
many years of cultivation to render judgments concerning it admissible.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Elephant Mound (Grant County, Wisconsin).]
But to return to the carving, a somewhat novel feature in it, and one
which has been objected to as casting a doubt upon its authenticity,
is the spear between the two upright human figures on the right. Large
flint spear-points, so-called, are found abundantly in the Eastern
States, and within the last hundred years instances of the use of
the spear by the Indians in hunting and fishing are common; no one
doubts, as we learn, for instance, in Tanner's narrative, that the
Indians speared salmon in the Eastern rivers, or, as Catlin shows,
used steel-pointed lances in their Western buffalo hunts. Yet the
early writers, in their descriptions of aboriginal implements, have
been supposed to make no mention of the spear, and there has been some
controversy among archæologists as to whether it can be classed among
Indian prehistoric weapons of warfare or the chase.
Dr. Abbott, who, in his "Prehistoric Industry," has given a wood-cut
of the curious egg-shaped stone found at Lake Winnipissiogee, and upon
which there are several carvings of spears, quotes in the same work, by
way of the nearest approach to an allusion to the spear among the early
writers, a description from Josselyn of an elk-hunt among the early
Massachusetts Indians, in which the writer describes a lance made of a
staff a yard and a half long and pointed with fish-bone. But a passage
in Bernal Diaz del Castillo ("Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la
nueva Espana," Madrid, 1638), kindly pointed out to the writer by Dr.
Rau, seems to furnish conclusive evidence on the subject. Bernal Diaz,
among several instances in his works, speaks (chapter vi.) of an attack
upon the Spaniards in Florida by Indians "armed with immense-sized
bows, sharp arrows, and spears, among which some were shaped like
swords" ("y lanzas y unas ā manera de espadas").
Furthermore there is fig. 5 (plate xiv. from De Bry's "Brevis
Narratio," published in Latin in Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1591),
representing Indians holding spears, for which likewise the writer is
indebted to Dr. Rau. It was drawn from life by one Jacques Le Moyne, a
French artist, in 1564. He had come to Florida with the French Admiral
Laudonnière, and having been left by the expedition for some months at
a fort upon the St. John's River, frequently made sketching expeditions
among the neighboring tribes. Many similar drawings by him of warriors
armed with spears are to be found among the numerous illustrations in
De Bry.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Picture of North American Indians carrying
spears, drawn from life by Jacques Le Moyne, in 1564.]
Passing over the mysterious animal on one of the Davenport tablets,
sometimes taken for a mammoth, and the pictograph on a boulder near
the Gila River seen by Colonel W. H. Emory in 1846 in a military
reconnaissance,[F] and which, he says, "may with some stretch of the
imagination be supposed to be a mastodon," we come to the supposed
traces of the elephant noticed by numerous writers in the mural
paintings and architecture of Mexico and Central America.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Elephant Trunk (Uxmal).]
Figures 6 and 7, reduced from Catherwood's "Atlas" to Stephens'
"Yucatan," are fair specimens of the remarkable architectural ornaments
from Central America known as elephant trunks, and which, placed
between two eyes and a mouth-like cavity, seem at first, as Waldeck and
other travellers have remarked, to bear a striking resemblance to the
trunk of a proboscidean.
Figure 6 is from the gateway of the great Teocallis at Uxmal, and 7
from that of the Casa de las Monjos at Uxmal; as in the case of all
the other "elephant trunks," however, they offer no suggestion of the
prominent tusks of the American elephant, and, as Dr. F. W. Putnam
maintains, should perhaps be looked upon as grotesque representations
of the human race, of which the so-called trunk forms the nose.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Elephant Trunk (Uxmal).]
Far more striking among the so-called traces of the elephant in North
America are the priests' head-dresses from Mexico and Yucatan.
Figure 8, a reduction from plate xiii. in Waldeck's "Recherches sur les
Ruines de Palenque," is taken from a stucco bas-relief in the palace of
Palenque. Waldeck considers it "evidently a representation of the head
of a proboscidean."
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Elephant Head-dress (Palenque).]
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Elephant Head-dress (Mexico).]
Figure 9, the no less fantastic Mexican head-dress, is from the Vues
des Cordilleras, plate xv. As to it, Humboldt says: "I would not have
had this hideous scene engraved, were it not for the remarkable and
apparently not accidental resemblance of the priest's head-dress to
the Hindoo Ganesa, or elephant-headed god of wisdom. It seems hardly
possible to suppose that a tapir's snout could have suggested the trunk
in the head-dress, and we are almost left to infer either that the
people of Atzlan had received some notice of the elephant from Asia,
or that their traditions reached back to the time of the American
elephant."
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Prehistoric carving of the Mammoth from the
cave of La Madeleine.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--Mammoth Carving from the Collection of M.
Lartet.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Mammoth Carving from the Collection of M.
Lartet.]
It is interesting to compare the Lenape Stone with the mammoth carvings
of the cave-men of Europe, of which we here give the series. None of
these outlines equal the Lenape drawing in realistic spirit except,
perhaps (fig. 10) the most remarkable of them all, the celebrated La
Madeleine carving. It is engraved upon mammoth ivory and was discovered
in 1864 in the cave of La Madeleine, Perigord, France, by M. Louis
Lartet. It was broken into five fragments, and like the carving on the
Lenape Stone, which it singularly resembles in general position, and in
the indecisive drawing of the back and tail, unmistakably represents
the mammoth. The mammoth scratching his side (fig. 11), and the very
indistinct head (fig. 12), carved on opposite sides of a bone plate,
are from the Edouard Lartet collection. M. Louis Lartet, brother of
the former, in his description of the drawings in the "Matériaux
pour l'histoire primitive de l'homme," vol. ix., p. 33, thinks that
"the primitive artist to whom these rude but sufficiently faithful
representations are due, and who changed his mind several times when
sketching, had, without doubt, the living model before his eyes, and
was disturbed in his work by the movements of the animal."
[Illustration: FIG. 13--Mammoth Dagger-hilt from the Rock Shelter of
Bruniquel.]
Figure 13, is the mammoth dagger-hilt carved in deer horn, in the
collection of M. Peccadeau de l'Isle. It was discovered in the rock
shelter of Bruniquel (Tarne et Garonne), France. Here, to avoid
breakage probably, the muzzle has been greatly exaggerated and the
shape of the trunk and position of the tusks have been considerably
departed from.
[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Head of Mammoth from the cave of Laugerie
Basse.]
The least interesting specimen perhaps in the French collection is
(fig. 14) the very indistinct elephant's head, minus the tusks,
discovered by the Marquis de Vibraye in the cave of Laugerie Basse,
Dordogne, France. Another so-called prehistoric representation of
the mammoth, though resembling that animal only in the trunk-like
prolongation of its muzzle, is (fig. 15) a more modern bronze specimen
from Siberia. The writer of the description in the "Matériaux," vol.
iv., p. 197, prefers to consider it a fantastic cat, tiger, or lion.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--Bronze figure supposed to represent the
Mammoth. (Siberia.)]