Thomas Jefferson and Big Bone Lick

Enter the British

By the early 1750s, traders, surveyors and land speculators from the British colonies began extending into the Ohio River valley. Accounts of the remarkable bones and teeth from the Big Bone Lick soon made their way back to influential colonists, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The occasional fossil specimen also found its way back East. The incursion of British colonials into the Ohio Valley alarmed the French and led to the Seven Year War (1756-1763, also known as the French and Indian War). At the conclusion of the war, the French were driven from North America and British colonials returned to the Ohio in even greater numbers.

Native American groups formerly allied with the French became concerned about these renewed incursions. In 1765, British authorities sent William Croghan to the Ohio Valley in an effort to ease these concerns. During his travels he stopped at Big Bone Lick and collected a few specimens, but these were lost after his party was captured by an Illinois war party.

Croghan eventually secured his release and returned to the Ohio Valley in 1766 with a much larger party to trade with Native Americans and to re-supply a British garrison. This time they spent an entire day at Big Bone Lick and collected hundreds of pounds of bones and teeth. Upon his return, Croghan sent his specimens to Lord Shelburne, the British minister for the American colonies, and to Benjamin Franklin, who at the time was an influential Pennsylvania lobbyist living in London. Lord Shelburne received two tusks, several isolated molars and a lower jaw containing two molars. Franklin received four tusks, a vertebra and three molars.

Unlike the French collection, which was ensconced in the Cabinet du Roi, Croghan's fossils were accessible to a number of London's naturalists. Consequently, they elicited considerable discussion among members of the Royal Society. In late 1767 Peter Collinson, a physician in correspondence with several naturalists from France and the Colonies, reported to the Royal Society that the fossils apparently belonged to an unknown animal. It may have had tusks like the elephant, but its teeth were clearly different. Moreover, unlike the elephant, this Ohio animal lived far from the tropics. Collinson also concluded that, like the elephant, this animal lack the speed and agility to be a predator and thus would be restricted to feeding on plants.

The Royal Society was presented with another interpretation of Croghan's fossils in early 1768. This time by William Hunter, a prestigious lecturer of anatomy and a physician who attended to the Queen. He compared the London fossils with the jaws and molars of a modern elephant as well as the illustrations from Daubenton's 1762 publication. Hunter concluded that the creature, now dubbed the "American incognitum", was distinct from the elephant, but that it may belong to the same species as the Siberian mammoth. The pronounced knobs on the teeth had convinced him that, unlike the elephant, this animal was carnivorous. Significantly, Hunter also concluded that the beast was probably extinct. Indeed, he told his audience that they should be grateful that such a monster no longer presented a threat to men.