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Murray C. Morgan
Henry Tukeman:
Mammoth's Roar was Heard All The Way to the Smithsonian
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Henry Tukeman:
Mammoth's Roar was Heard All The Way to the Smithsonian
 Rummaging
around the attic looking for something else I recently came across
a file I began keeping years ago on Alaska improbabilities. Among
the accounts of talking whales, lost emerald mines,
backward-flowing rivers and mountainleveling beavers was the story
told by a Klondiker who signed himself Harry Tukeman. It was
printed in McClure's magazine in October of 1899 and, unlike the
other improbables, it had consequences.
Tukeman
told of encountering mammoths, living mammoths, on the Porcupine
River near the Alaska/Yukon border.
While
wintering at Fort Yukon in 1890, he said, he passed the time by
reading aloud to an Indian friend named Joe. One of the stories
concerned elephants. When he showed Joe a picture of an elephant
the Indian became excited. He said he had seen such an animal, up
there, pointing north and east.
Joe
said he had been hunting on the upper Porcupine River when he came
to a cave filled with bones of big animals. The cave opened onto a
valley, and in the valley were fresh tracks, "footprints
longer than a rifle." Joe followed the tracks to a lake, and
in the lake stood a creature of size and shape he had never seen,
or heard of around the campfire.
"He
is throwing water over himself with his long nose, and his two
front teeth stand out before his head for ten gunlengths, turned
up and shining like a swan's wing in the sunlight. Alongside him,
this cabin would be like a two-week boar cub beside its mother."
Tukeman
said Joe wouldn't guide him to the cave but told a younger
tribesman named Paul how to get to the mammoth stomping grounds.
They found the cave, found the valley, and, sure enough, found a
mammoth. But how does one bag a mammoth?
Tukeman
theorized that most mammoths had disappeared during a period of
intense volcanic activity. If so, the descendants of the survivors
would hate fires.
So
he and Paul built a shooting platform in a tree. Then they built a
smudgy fire below the tree. Sure enough, the mammoth came to stamp
it out. All the time the mammoth was stomping, they were shooting.
Killed him, too.
It
took weeks to skin the monster and cut out its enormous tusks.
After measuring the internal organs, they left the valley with the
trophy skin and tusks. Somehow they managed to descend the
Porcupine to the Yukon, the Yukon to the Bering, and from there
they made it to Seattle.
Tukeman
wrote that his plan was to turn the specimen over to the British
Museum, but a shy American millionaire bought it, had the skin
stuffed and presented it, anonymously, to the Smithsonian. He
wanted no credit for his charity and pledged Tukeman to remain
silent until after his death. He had died in 1898 leaving Tukeman
free to tell the story.
Mammoth
stories were always worth repeating. This one appeared in
McClure's, a publication largely devoted to serious stuff. The
mammoth yarn was sandwiched between an essay by Gov. Theodore
Roosevelt of New York on the career of Admiral George Dewey and a
report from Paris on the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for
alleged treason.
Not
only did Tukeman's mammoth whopper stimulate arguments in saloons
from Tacoma to Dawson City, it drew swarms of visitors to the
Smithsonian. They wanted to see the creature that in one account
had become "big as a governor's house, with tusks as long as
the moral law, and a tail resembling the mainmast on a clipper
ship." Told that the Smithsonian had no such exhibit, that no
mammoths had existed for thousands of years, they were indignant
with the Smithsonian.
Finally,
the Smithsonian's paleontology expert, Charles Schuchert called a
press conference. He and a representative from McClure's explained
that Henry Tukeman was really an American short story writer named
H.T. Hann. McClure's editors had thought the fantasy was so
apparent that there had been no need to identify it as fiction.
The mammoth tale was not intended as a hoax, just "an
interesting story without foundation in fact."
It
has been some time since we had a Sasquatch sighting.
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