BACKROADS • JULY 2021
Page 11
Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s
MYSTERIOUS AMERICA
PEALE’S MASTODON A revolutionary hero and artist makes the greatest scientific discovery of his time Does the name Charles Wilson Peale ring a bell? If you are a Revolutionary War buff his name might be familiar, but Charles Wilson Peale was a man of many talents, thoughts, and endeavors. Among his numerous accomplishments—artist, inventor, naturalist, museum proprietor, co-founder of the Pennsylvania Academy, and patriarch of an artistic dynasty —Peale was also a soldier in the War of Independence. Despite his abhorrence of violence, Peale’s desire for a free America compelled him to enlist. He rose to the rank of Captain, striving to ease his troop’s hardships during the hard winter at Valley Forge. Intelligent and energetic, Peale even managed to further his emergent painting career during the war, executing miniature portraits, including some of General George Washington; Peale did at least four portrait sittings with the future first president. But, as much as we love Washington, it was
something else, as equally remarkable with which Peale became involved, having to do with a sitting US President, a French naturalist, and a creature dead for nearly 15,000 years. It was 1797 and the French Naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon had published a multivolume work on natural history, ‘Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére’. This massive treatise, which eventually grew to 44 quarto volumes, became an essential reference work for anyone interested in the study of nature. But he did write something that just totally pissed off Thomas Jefferson? He claimed that their North America and its people were “devoid of large, powerful creatures and that its human inhabitants were ‘feeble’ by comparison to their European counterparts.” Buffon attributed this alleged situation to the cold and damp climate in much of America. The claim infuriated Thomas Jefferson, who spent much time and effort trying to refute it— even sending Buffon a large bull moose procured at considerable cost from Vermont.
