Gone Mammothin’

“Shall the great mammoth of the American forest leave his native element and plunge into water in a mad contest with the shark?”

John Randolph (1773-1833) – a colorful, not to say histrionic, Congressman who brought his slaves and hunting dogs onto the floor of Congress, ate buckets of opium, and probably had a crush on Andrew Jackson; in other words, another fine example of the American conservative – speaking of young America’s relationship to British navel power in 1805.

Although Randolph had never seen a mammoth, not outside his opium dreams, he, like Thomas Jefferson, believed they existed out there. Probably beyond the Mississippi. The great tusked beasts (“mammoth” is from a Siberian Mansi word, possibly meaning “earth horn”) had to be out there somewhere, since their remains were the talk of the town.

Extinction was not yet a mainstream concept. I find this rather fascinating: what conceptual frameworks of today, which we are so implicitly sure of, will be incomprehensible, if not laughable, in a century? The reigning assumption then was that the Judeo-Christian skygod had created a “great chain of being” from the lowest to the highest and all the earthly life forms that had ever lived still lived, as long as they had made it on to the Ark. (Now, I like beetles, but I get the willies thinking of all the beetles on that tub: up to 2 million of them, and the ants!). The mammoths had only been gone for a few thousand years, like the rest of the Pleistocene megafauna of North America (saber-tooths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, etc.), but they were gone.

Dinosaurs, gone for oh-so-much longer, didn’t start presenting a problem to this notion for several more decades. Darwin wasn’t born until 1809, Wallace until 1823. We now know the vast majority of life forms Earth has seen are extinct.

But, all that was in the future: among many other tasks, Lewis & Clark were charged by Jefferson with finding them some mammoth. A big, wooly, wild goose chase ensued.