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The Mastodon
Charles Willson Peale assembled the first nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon excavated from a pit near Newburgh, New York. The mammoth, as it was then called, was the largest known terrestrial being. On Christmas Eve in 1801, Peale opened the Mammoth Room at his museum to the public, ushering in 1802 as the year of the mammoth in the United States. Newspapers chronicled the creation of a mammoth cheese, followed by a sequence of mammoth-designated foodstuffs concocted to celebrate the discovery. Jefferson himself was deemed "the mammoth chief." Before Humboldt left the United States, he was honored with a celebratory dinner beneath this skeleton in Peale's Mammoth Room.
Peale advertised the mammoth skeleton as an "ANTIQUE WONDER of North America." The behemoth was described as the ninth Wonder of the World." Aiming to silence Europeans who scorned America as culturally backward, Peale and Jefferson were eager to find New World equivalents to the man-made wonders of the Old World. The mammoth was the closest thing to an architectural wonder the United States could provide. In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson pointed to its impressive scale as being emblematic of America's robust prospects for future growth and its significance on the world stage.
After the Peale Museum closed in 1847, this skeleton was packed up and shipped first to Paris and then London in an effort to find a buyer. Johann Jakob Kaup, an agent for the Hessian Prince, acquired the skeleton in 1854 and brought it to Darmstadt, Germany, where it has been ever since. This is the mastodon's first return to the United States in more than 170 years. |