MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

PEALE’S MASTODON A revolutionary hero and artist makes the greatest scienti c 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 rst 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.

Some years earlier French explorers (irony?) discovered large bones along the Ohio River, near what would become Bone Lick, Kentucky.

The native Shawnee were aware of these giant bones and later on the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone and others, such as the future president William Henry Harrison, collected many more bones and teeth at Big Bone Lick and presented them to George Washington, Ben Franklin, and other American notables. Sponsored by President Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark also recovered remains at the site, some of which would end up at Monticello.

But then word came about that large bones, much like those found in the mid-west, had been uncovered in a marl pit not far from the Walpack River, just outside the town we know as Montgomery, New York.

Owned by a farmer named John Masten, who refused to sell the remains to Jefferson, but in 1801 Peale succeeded in buying Masten’s bones and teeth, paying the farmer $200 (about $4,000 today) and tossed in new gowns for his wife and daughters, along with a gun for the farmer’s son.

With an additional $100, Peale secured the right to further excavate the marl pit.

Things began to happen quickly; It was a marl pit. They are a mess but as we learned a few years back in this column when I wrote about a similar pit in New Jersey – marl pits can contain pre-historic gold.

Marl pits tend to ll with groundwater so Peale hired a local millwright to build a huge wheel to remove the water. It took four big men walking abreast to provide the power to move a chain of buckets and bail out the water and recover all the bones they could nd. In his quest to get as many bones and teeth of

the mastodon as possible, Peale acquired additional remains from marl pits on two neighboring properties before shipping everything to Philadelphia. One of these sites, the Barber Farm in Montgomery, is today listed as “Peale’s Barber Farm Mastodon Exhumation Site” in the National Register of Historic Places.

And, here we are today – across from the Valley Central High School - on New York Route 17K - where history happened, yet few remember.

We had gone for brunch at The Borland House – a wonderful nd by itself – and came across a bit of history, national indignation, and scienti c discovery – all part of Mysterious America. ,