Skull of Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)
A READER OF THE JUNE 10, 1876, edition of the Walla Walla Union would have learned that the Columbia River was still rising with spring runoff. A crew had been dispatched to repair the wagon road to Wallula, and plans were well underway for a Grand Centennial Fourth of July celebration. On page three, there was a report on rosebushes being despoiled in the local graveyard, coupled with a message to anyone with desecration in mind: “The ghoul in human shape that thus despoiled a grave is unfit to live, and at death should be buried in the center of the most public crossroad in this country.” A warning that the cemetery was being watched was followed by a news item from a small settlement a hundred miles northeast on Hangman Creek, so called after a summary execution beside its banks during a conflict between local tribes and U.S. soldiers in 1858. The creek bisected a lush valley known by the traditional Coeur d’Alene name of Latah, which was tucked in the rolling grasslands of the Palouse Hills on the eastern edge of Washington Territory:
LARGE HORN—A private letter from Hangman Creek, Stevens county, dated the 30th of May, states that parties living there have found some of the bones of a very large animal.… “We have just got out a piece of the horn 3 feet 7 1/2 inches long, being just a part of the point of the horn. The horn when we get it all out will measure 9 or 10 feet long.”
Looking back, Alonzo Coplen thought it was simple curiosity that precipitated the great adventure that befell his family in the spring of 1876. The Coplen homestead was perched on a hillside overlooking a wide bend in Hangman Creek. Several springs clustered in the creek bottom, forming a boggy area where cattle occasionally got mired. Alonzo described a peculiar piece of ground raised a little above the level of the flat, a peat formation that shook when anyone walked across it.
One afternoon in May, the brothers began probing the ground near one of the springs with a long pole, and indeed, there is nothing quite like a bog to invite a good poke: the ooze; the trembling earth; the shimmers of anticipation at what might lie beneath. Their rod hissed down through the green mat of sedges. On one of the thrusts, it struck something hard. Their interest piqued, the brothers mucked back to the barnyard and attached a large iron hook to the end of their pole. They plunged this implement into the morass, grappled about, and after a time coaxed a large object to the surface. Upon examination it turned out to be an enormous vertebra, far too large for any animal they had ever seen. Back down went the grappling hook, and this time an outsize shoulder blade emerged, two feet long and almost as wide.
There was no stopping them now. Thirty-three-year-old Ben, who had worked a stint in the Colorado silver mines, outlined a plan to drain a section of the bog. Luckily, he had a crew of siblings to help: Lewis, who was twenty-nine; George, twenty; Alonzo, thirteen; and eight-year-old Isaac. Beginning on the shore of the creek, a hundred yards from their find, they set to work slicing a deep channel through the wetland. To keep the walls of the fresh ditch from collapsing, they drove stakes along both sides, then stuffed brush tight behind them. After digging through the black topsoil, they shoveled a layer of fibrous peat, then a stratum of white volcanic ash, then another peat layer that was speckled with woody debris.
At a depth of eight or ten feet, they bottomed out on a bed of gravel and began trenching steadfastly toward the targeted springhole. Alonzo recollected that about halfway there, they uncovered a large stone spearhead, several stone arrowheads, and a small human skull. Just beyond these startling finds, their shovels struck an area where the sand and gravel were blackened by what he and his brothers took to be ashes from a prehistoric campfire. The budding archaeologists collected the artifacts and kept digging, holding their course for the alluring spring.
Although the Latah valley was still only sparsely settled, a few neighbors pitched in to help as the excavation continued through the long days of June. When Ben’s ambitious trench finally reached the vicinity of the original discoveries, the diggers hit a mother lode of curious bones. Some lay at the bottom of the seeping spring in a layer of blue clay, and were hard and firm; others were embedded in the surrounding peat. These looked perfect when first uncovered, but Ben characterized them as “soft like soap,” and many crumbled to pieces when moved.
Before long, over a hundred bones lay drying on the ground, and it was soon apparent that more than one type of animal was buried in the bog. Ben thought some of the shapes had come from squirrels, while Alonzo remembered horselike parts and the skull of a bird with a long beak. To farm boys who had been around livestock carcasses all their lives, many of the larger bones were recognizable mammal parts like vertebrae and ribs. Not so familiar were several long, elegantly curved appendages, which the Coplens interpreted as horns, several orders of magnitude larger than those of an ox or long-horned cow.
The Coplens and their neighbors were not the first people to be puzzled by such “horns.” Medieval Europeans who dug up similar objects believed that they must have adorned the heads of dragons or griffins. Mongol tribesmen in Siberia attributed the curved ivory they found along their riverbanks to enormous mud-eating rats called mammuts that lived underground and used the long horns to dig tunnels through the earth. Some scientists assigned them to antediluvian creatures that had missed the Ark for one reason or another. When seventeenth-century quarry workers dug up several of the strange appendages in a small town in Germany, the mayor declared that they had come from unicorns and even drew a picture of what the beasts must have looked like. Travelers returning from India and Africa called attention to the similarity between these long horns and the tusks of elephants, spawning explanations for their presence in the north that ranged from animals left by Hannibal’s invasion to skeletons swept north by the Deluge.
As word of the discovery on Hangman Creek spread, settlers arrived from miles around to gawk at the outrageous specimens; at some point the brothers, feeding on the shared excitement, decided they should exhibit this wonderful menagerie around the countryside. While it wasn’t out of character for any Coplen to ramble, Ben in particular had displayed a pair of itchy feet. After homesteading around the Midwest with his family, he had journeyed to Colorado at age eighteen for a go at hard-rock mining. Just before the Civil War, he returned to Iowa and married, then brought his bride back to Colorado. Over the next two years, Ben gained a daughter, rode with the U.S. Cavalry, and buried his wife. He sampled frontier life in Wyoming and Nevada before rejoining his father’s clan, who by that time was settling into a third homestead in Washington Territory. A burly man with wild eyebrows, Ben was by all accounts an engaging and gregarious character; he was probably the instigator for the tour. Brother Lewis pitched in to help, and the entrepreneurs loaded a farm wagon with the best of their big bones and tossed a tent on top.
THE BROTHERS RATTLED west and south thirty miles through the heart of the Palouse to the small town of Colfax. Although it was only a half-dozen years old, its population already numbered more than a hundred souls, and the town boasted a flour mill, a sawmill, two general stores, and two kerosene streetlights. Apparently one of the first things Ben and Lewis did when they arrived on June 26 was find a scale and enlist volunteers to help them weigh and measure their bones. The “horn” they had brought weighed 145 pounds and measured 10 feet along the outside of its curve. The pelvis tipped the scales at 135 pounds, followed by a jawbone, 63 pounds, and a shoulder blade, 40 pounds. A single small tooth, only half the size of the ones still set in the jaw, weighed 10 pounds.
Some of the onlookers in Colfax that weekend were sufficiently inspired by the exhibit to fire off letters to their favorite newspapers. J. H. Kenedy, who helped weigh and measure the collection, pronounced it “the grandest discovery of the age to the geological world” and postulated that the Coplens had unearthed “an animal known to the antiquists as the behemoth.” The author of an unsigned letter in the Walla Walla Union consulted a more modern text, using the adjective “mammoth” to describe the bones. The pelvis was so enormous, he marveled, that a grown man could pass through its opening by stooping just a little. He correctly noted that the flat grinding surfaces of the teeth differed from those of mastodons, which have pronounced knobs, like the bottom of an egg carton, on their biting surfaces.
Local schoolteacher James Edmiston also showed some knowledge of extinct pachyderms. He wondered whether the curved “horn” might actually be a tusk, and he noticed that the tip of the massive jawbone ended in a protuberance that tilted downward, as if to support a snout. His letter to the Portland Oregonian, headlined “The Centennial Mammoth,” made a symbolic connection between the emergence of the magnificent bones and the celebration of America’s first great anniversary. Using scientific terms like “processes” and “cartilaginous surface,” Edmiston delineated the perfect half-moon opening of the pelvic girdle, but his letter was not all technical jargon. After recounting the massive thickness of one mandible, he indulged in a little wordplay: “This may be more jawbone than you like to take, but existing facts cannot be avoided.”
With summer’s dust swirling around their wagon, Ben and Lewis continued south, ferried across the swollen Snake River, and made for the town of Dayton, where an amateur photographer took pictures of the bones. Like the Colfax correspondents, this shutter-bug had a keen interest in scientific matters, and as soon as he developed his plates, he dispatched copies east via the overland stage, addressed to Professor James Dwight Dana, the preeminent geologist at Yale University. Dana’s Manual of Geology, a textbook used by basic science classes in colleges around the United States, included a section on extinct elephants.
The Coplens arrived in Walla Walla just in time for the largest Fourth of July centennial celebration in the Inland Northwest, with a crowd estimated at three to five thousand people. After a brass band and glee club performance of patriotic odes, a parade marched down Main Street, led by a small monkey turning handsprings, marshaled by a man in a gorilla suit, and gravely followed by a baby elephant. Somewhere amidst the fanfare, another photographer discovered the Coplens’ own elephantine display. Within a few days, fresh prints labeled “the biggest ‘horn’ ever taken” and “the biggest jawbone in the country” graced the front window of his gallery.
While news of General Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn began to rumble through the countryside, Ben and Lewis made the long wagon journey back to Hangman Creek and began work on a new pit a short distance from their original dig. A few days later, James Edmiston arrived to write a promised follow-up to his Colfax letter. There were new fossils to admire, including a rib almost five feet in length and a thirteen-foot tusk that was too rotten to extract. The inquisitive Edmiston must have been doing some homework in the weeks since he had viewed the bones in Colfax, because he now concluded that the animal belonged to the species Elephas primigenius (first-born elephant). This was the name that the scientific community had assigned to woolly mammoths at that time; it would be many years before all mammoths assumed their current genus name of Mammuthus and the creatures found in the Palouse were designated as Mammuthus columbi, Columbian mammoths. In addition to the bones, Edmiston noted that “a piece of charcoal was found on the gravel bed, bearing marks of an instrument. The marks are very distinct and seem to have been done with some rude instrument.”
Edmiston also examined additional teeth that had been unearthed and remarked on their resemblance to those of living Indian elephants, “particularly in that the ribands of the teeth are waving and running obliquely crosswise.” Elephant molars have always provided an important key for distinguishing species, but their variations in shape and size can be quite confusing. Looking at two of the loose teeth, Edmiston tried to describe them for his readers: “I can think of nothing better to compare them to than the head of a sucker fish, the top of the head representing the root of the tooth, the mouth the surface that has been used for nipping only.”
When a friend recently loaned us a beautiful mammoth molar she had found, we installed it in the center of the dining room table to admire. My kids could think of nothing better to compare it to than one of their mother’s tennis shoes—the bottom of the sole representing the surface for chewing and the size being just about the same—but visitors came up with much more exotic likenesses. A math teacher took a quick look and pronounced it to be a sea urchin, pure and simple. Her son thought it looked more like a piece of whale baleen. The five-year-old entomologist next door was certain it was some kind of funny bug. None of them, however, suggested that it might be the tooth of a giant, the most common conclusion for observers of similar teeth for many generations, from an Englishman on the Essex shore in 1400 to the governor of Massachusetts Colony in 1705. African-born slaves in the Carolinas, however, immediately recognized three large molars unearthed there in the 1730s as “the grinders of an elephant.”
Like a modern elephant, a baby mammoth was born with four molars, one in each quadrant of its jaw. These baby teeth couldn’t process enough food to keep a young mammoth growing for long, and before the youngster was weaned at two or three years of age, a larger set of grinders erupted behind them, instead of beneath them as in other mammals. As the animal grew, these new teeth began to move forward in the jaw like a package on a conveyor belt, eventually pushing the worn first molars out of the mouth. A few years later a third set of molars, almost six inches long, emerged behind the second. It was undoubtably one of these early molars that a Colfax observer described as “the tooth of a human being, which is larger than three or four of our teeth.” During the first three decades of a mammoth’s life, six succeeding sets of molars rode into position, each bigger than the preceding set. The last and largest quartet of teeth, often measuring an honest foot in length, arrived when a mammoth was in its mid-thirties.
Mammoth baby teeth were similar in size and shape to human wisdom teeth, but the later teeth were something else entirely. On the biting surface of one of these molars, a narrow ivory ridge loops back and forth across the oval surface, like a long enamel worm curling gracefully back on itself in a continuous, controlled pattern. Succeeding teeth display increasing numbers of loops, with complex variations of amplitude and frequency; if you view the teeth from the side, you can see that these loops are formed by parallel plates of enamel, with thin layers of dentine sandwiched between. The number of enamel ridges, combined with the size of the tooth, provides biologists with a rough index for aging fossil finds; the Coplens, for example, unearthed animals ranging from youngsters to middle-aged adults.
When the animal chewed, the top and bottom molars slid back and forth against each other like millstones, masticating tough grass between the enamel ridges. The mandibles were in almost constant motion as the mammoth processed the enormous amount of roughage needed to support its massive weight; one Columbian mammoth, weighing up to ten tons, may have spent twenty hours a day ingesting an estimated five hundred pounds of raw vegetation. A short list of food items recovered from fossilized mammoth dung includes a high percentage of grasses, rushes, and sedges, supplemented with browse such as birch, rose, saltbush, sagebrush, blue spruce, wolfberry, and red-osier dogwood. Such a diet, and the dirt that came with it, would have taken a toll on any set of teeth. At some point not too far off the human allotment of three score and ten years, the ridged surfaces of those final four grinders were worn to the root and could no longer sufficiently masticate food, and many elderly animals apparently died of starvation.
Around the same time that James Edmiston visited the Latah dig, Philip Ritz, a commissioner assigned to collect grain samples for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, also stopped by for a look at “the great unknown bones.” He found that the brothers’ new pit was yielding fossils only four feet below the surface. A pair of tusks looked to be nearly twelve feet long, but only one could be extracted whole. This brought the tusk count to nine, ranging in length from three to twelve feet. The brothers had also uncovered a huge skull, but it was too rotten to move and was left in “the black, oozy mud where it was deposited ages ago.” Before concluding his letter, Ritz remarked that some other large bones recently had been discovered nearby.
William and Thomas Donahoe, Irish immigrants from Quebec, lived on a homestead about twelve miles west of the Latah valley. Tom recalled that when he and his brother Bill first heard about the Coplen discovery, they immediately thought of their own spring beside Pine Creek. About twenty feet deep with a clean sandy bottom, it had provided them with water since their arrival in the Palouse five years earlier. The brothers bolted sturdy grapnels onto two long poles and began to probe, Coplen-style, and it wasn’t long before they hooked onto something solid beneath the sand.
For two days the Donahoes tugged and pulled, constructing a farmer’s arsenal of levers and gantries and calling on neighbors to help. They finally extracted a gargantuan skull that measured thirty-five inches between the eyes, fifty inches between the ears, and forty-two inches from the back of the head to the front of the nose. Even without its tusks, which had broken off during the pulling and tugging, the Donahoes estimated the weight of the skull at eight hundred pounds. With seven able-bodied neighbors, they tried to haul up the rest of the skeleton, but the task was too much for their grapnels. “We found that would not do, so we started to ditch it,” the brothers reported in a letter to Walla Walla. “We expect to have it ditched and the bones out in 8 days.”
So another set of brothers found themselves astonished and eager to see more. Another assortment of amazing bones piled up around a spring. Another set of curious onlookers gathered around. “About the time we had most of the bones fished out,” Tom remembered, “here comes a fellow with a band of sheep, headed for Montana. When he saw those bones, he just went wild, mind you. He wanted to trade those sheep, 700 of them, for a third interest in the elephant bones. He had a partner and we said he’d better wait and talk it over with him before he made a deal, but he was dead set on getting in on the fortune from the fossils. He was lucky we didn’t take him up.”
It is hard to say who was the luckier party; the next week, a Walla Walla paper reported that the price of sheep had reached its lowest level in ten years. But if the Donahoes hesitated to jump at the first offer dangled in front of them, they were not immune to the idea of commerce. Tom told a visitor that they were confident they were sitting on a bonanza, and by the end of the summer a second set of brothers was thinking of mounting a tour.
WHILE THE DONAHOES were hoisting the giant skull from their spring, Ben Coplen rolled back into Walla Walla to show off the most recent diggings from the Latah bog, including ribs, vertebrae, and five new tusks. “Our country is famous for bones if not money,” crowed a local editor as reports of the two incredible discoveries continued to flash through regional newspapers.
The Coplen display gained further acclaim when Yale professor James Dwight Dana acknowledged the photographs sent to him from Dayton. In his reply, which was printed in the Walla Walla Union, Dana bestowed the first validation from the scientific establishment, stating that the bones belonged to “the extinct American Elephant or Mammoth.” But a different opinion was printed the same day in western Oregon by the Eugene City Guard, whose editor had been following reports of the Palouse fossil finds and had concluded that the prehistoric artifacts certainly belonged to a unicorn.
By mid-August, Ben Coplen, aiming for larger crowds, had arranged with the vice president of the Oregon Steam and Navigation Company to provide free passage on a steamboat down the Columbia. When Ben boarded the steamer at Wallula Landing, at least one other person was along to help heft the massive fossils—probably his younger brother George, who was to enroll that fall in a secondary school near Portland, and possibly a neighbor named Bill Bohard as well. (According to Alonzo, Bohard had purchased Lewis Coplen’s share in the enterprise for a span of horses and a small sum of money.) Whoever they were, they billed themselves as the Coplen Brothers, and downstream at The Dalles they found an empty storefront on Main Street in which to display their wares. After a week of business at the busy portage for river traffic, the exhibitors placed a brief ad in a local paper:
The Coplen Brothers wishing to give the children of this City an opportunity to see the great fossil bones, extend an invitation to all the Sabbath School children and their teachers to visit them, free of charge, on this Saturday afternoon.
Then it was back on a steamer for the ride downstream to Portland, where they set up their exhibit downtown, charging spectators twenty-five cents a head. A thoughtful newspaper review of the display compared the fossil-laden ground of eastern Washington with Siberia’s frozen taiga, which had recently yielded an entire woolly mammoth encased in ice; like many a later scribe, the reporter pondered the roles of climatic change and early man in the animals’ extinction. Mammoths and climate were also on the mind of physician Philip Harvey, who accepted the loan of several bones from the Coplen collection to illustrate a lecture at the Good Templars’ Hall on the “Great Ice Time.”
The last week of September was county fair time, and the Coplens journeyed a few miles west to Hillsboro, where they were welcomed by a newspaper editor as presenters of a first-class exhibition well worth patronizing: “A half hour spent in contemplating these monster evidences of the earth’s life, will give any one a better idea of the world we live in.” Their competition included such attractions as a world-renowned fire-eater, an eight-hundred-pound woman, and Montgomery Queen’s Circus. There was a display known as 100,000 Curiosities, under the command of T. A. Wood, who ran a combination natural history museum and freak show in downtown Portland. Dr. J. J. McBride, The King of Pain, was reputedly getting rich peddling a patent medicine known as The World’s Relief. A state senator took in the sights and crawled through the pelvis of the unearthed behemoth, but a reporter lamented that the fossils were not drawing all the attention they deserved: “Their exhibition is something that everyone can remember as food for profitable thought, which is more than can be said of the majority of shows.”
From Hillsboro, the Coplens moved on to Salem and a most appreciative audience in the person of Thomas Condon. A former Presbyterian missionary who was known around the territory for his paleontological zeal, Condon had recently resigned his position as Oregon’s first state geologist to chair the science department at the new university in Eugene City. The professor, who had discovered mammoth remains himself and had looked at other finds in the region, declared the Palouse specimens “unquestionably the finest elephant remains ever unearthed on this Coast.” He was especially impressed with the examples of teeth and jawbones, calling attention to one mandible in particular, in which “the fifth molar is standing alone in marvelous perfection of its minutest outlines.”
In pondering the circumstances under which so many animals could have perished in an area not much larger than twenty feet square, the professor recounted his own experience with a packhorse that had wandered into a small peat bog and almost drowned in the bottomless mire before being rescued. A mammoth, he extrapolated, could easily have suffered the same fate.
An elephant might have gone to the brink of that pool to drink and dropped into it as the horse did, and remained there as helpless as he, till he drowned. Another and another might follow, and the bones of these animals, thus trapped, remain buried in the oozy mud, thoroughly preserved from decay.
Condon, an imaginative and poetic geologist, went on to detail his vision of the Northwest landscape back in the days “when these, now fossil bones, were clothed with flesh,” a time he reckoned at about two hundred thousand years ago.
A century and a quarter later, Condon’s life history conclusions remain remarkably apt, although his dates have been refined. Scientists now reckon that primitive proboscideans, which included ancestors of animals as various as hyrax and dugongs, first appeared in the tropical environs of Africa. Mastodons branched off more than twenty-five million years ago, while the first true elephants, with their ridged molar teeth and dentine tusks, arose about six million years ago. Over the next million years or so, the family split into the similar but clearly distinguishable lines of African elephants, Asian elephants, and mammoths. These early mammoths, which developed a distinctive spiral to their tusks, spread north into the more temperate climates of Europe and Eurasia.
When the Ice Ages began around a million and a half years ago, ancestral mammoths, like so much of our fauna, moved across Beringia to North America. In a classic example of parallel evolution, the animals that remained in Eurasia gave rise to woolly mammoths, while their North American counterparts evolved into the Columbian mammoth. For some reason, Columbian mammoths grew to be larger than their Eurasian cousins. Their tusks took on an extra curl that gave them their distinctive lyre shape, but their teeth retained a simpler form, and paleontologists do not believe that their coats ever approached the shagginess of their woolly kin. Columbian mammoths wandered across the grassy meadowlands and open woods known as the mammoth steppe, from southern Canada deep into Mexico. Woolly mammoths eventually crossed to North America as well, but their bones are generally found in more northerly latitudes, following the advances and recessions of the great ice sheets. In some areas, such as the upper Columbia drainage, the ranges of the two beasts overlapped. As the chill of the Pleistocene oscillated toward a warmer and drier time, the numbers of both mammoth species began to wane, and the animals disappeared from all but the most isolated parts of their range around eleven thousand years ago.
THE WALLA WALLA County Fair ran during the same week as its Hillsboro counterpart and numbered among its exhibits the fabulous fossils of the Donahoe brothers, who had rented a booth and hired a “ballyhooer” to bark in the crowds. The ponderous skull provided the main attraction, but William and Tom also had wired together two leg bones for full effect, leading one reporter to speculate that the live animal “must have been two sizes larger than the Court House.” When the fair was over, Tom Donahoe figured they had made about a hundred and twenty dollars for their efforts, and neither he nor the newly married William was interested in pursuing the traveling life any further. The brothers therefore sold their fossils for seven hundred dollars—about the same price as a herd of sheep—to “traveling agents” Falkner, Mitchell, and Thwing.
The new owners announced plans for a winter tour through California, and Nathaniel Thwing, who seems to have been the primary promoter for the tour, packed the bones and booked steamboat passage to Portland. Later characterized by a newspaper editor as an adept showman, Thwing demonstrated a talent for hyperbole, informing an editor at The Dalles that the tusks in his collection measured twenty-five feet in length—about twice the span of any known mammoth tusk. He was equally creative in matters of taxonomy, identifying his titan as a “mammoth mastodon.” (He did not specify whether this indicated an extra-large mastodon or a hybrid proboscidean.) By the time he reached Portland, the leg bones had grown to twenty feet in length, the weight of one tooth had more than doubled, and the skull, containing “gold and silver quartz in profusion,” was touted as the largest fossil remain ever found. Thwing had also decided to make a detour before mounting his tour of California, and he made sure that everyone knew his bones were headed to the great Centennial Fair, which pundits predicted would attract the largest crowd ever congregated in Oregon.
When the Centennial Fair opened in Salem on October 10, 1876, familiar attractions such as Montgomery Queen’s Centennial on Wheels and his Aggregation of Transcendental Elegance were on hand, along with T. A. Wood’s 100,000 Curiosities. So were two displays of mammoth bones. The Coplens handled their collection personally, while Nathaniel Thwing and a Walla Walla associate named John Hancock shilled for the Donahoe specimens. The fossil extravaganzas gained numerous mentions in the Fairground Jottings of local papers; several referred to the bones’ appeal to scientists and deep thinkers. One such cogitator was a Dr. Davis, identified as “the philosopher of Harrisburg,” who confided to a reporter that “the bones of the prehistoric brute found in Washington Territory … came from the moon when the continent of Africa crashed down after a volcanic eruption.”
As the fair came to a close, the “rival big bones men” headed off in opposite directions. Thwing traveled north to Portland, where the “mammoth mastodon” was loaded aboard a steamer to San Francisco. In early November the San Francisco Daily Call announced the opening of Thwing’s exhibit, reputed to contain seven distinct species of an enormous animal resembling the mammoth; the editor lamented that “neither the exhibitor nor the reporter is equal to giving a lucid description of the fossils.”
The Coplen Brothers, meanwhile, moved south on a tour of the Willamette Valley. By October 20, their display was installed in a former hat shop in downtown Albany and the Eugene City Guard was anticipating the imminent arrival of the Coplen bones in that town. Then something happened to change Ben’s plans. Perhaps it was the webfoot weather—it had rained every day since the fair ended—but the November 4 edition of the Guard included a succinct and disappointing headline: “Not Coming.” A couple of days later, it was announced that the great fossil bones had been leased to Pacific University in Forest Grove for use in its geology classes; within two weeks of this notice, the Tualatin Academy, a preparatory school adjacent to Pacific University, listed George Coplen of Washington Territory among its fall enrollees. The following winter, Ben Coplen confided to a visitor that custody of the bones had been exchanged for tuition.
IN THE LATE FALL OF 1877, a young fossil collector named Charles H. Sternberg was traveling down the Columbia River when he met an army surgeon who told him about the discoveries of mammoth bones in eastern Washington. Determined to investigate the fantastic discoveries, Sternberg journeyed to Walla Walla, where he hired two helpers and some packhorses and headed north. The men worked their way up Pine Creek to a promising spring, where they dug through layers of peat and clay before hitting a bed of gravel. Weeks of tedious, wet work produced a number of fine buffalo skulls, but not a single mammoth bone. “The farmer-fossil-hunters had been more fortunate,” Sternberg wrote.
Looking for some of that farmer’s luck, Sternberg visited both the Coplen and Donahoe springs. He listened to the list of animal remains taken from the digs, including deer, buffalo, and birds. He noted with interest the spear point that the Coplens had found on the gravel, and the tool marks on a piece of charred and partially petrified wood. Pondering some flint arrowheads and a bone tool that he had found mingled with the bison bones from his own dig, Sternberg wrote:
I never doubted, from what I saw and heard at the other excavations in the immediate neighborhood, and where the collectors went through the same kind of peat, clay and gravel as we had gone through, that man, the buffalo, elephant, and many existing species once lived together in eastern Washington.
While Sternberg was correct in his assumptions about the coexistence of people and Pleistocene mammals in the Northwest, it is impossible to draw any definitive conclusions about the human artifacts discovered by the Coplens or Sternberg because of the unscientific nature of their excavations. Over the past century, distinctive fluted spearpoints identified as belonging to the Clovis period (between 11,500 and 11,000 years before the present) have been found near the remains of mammoths at more than a dozen sites. Very few of these finds show indisputable evidence of hunting, and the exact relationship between people and mammoths remains a subject of some controversy.
One group of theorists interprets the evidence as saying that mammoths, as well as other large mammals, were driven to extinction by human hunting. An alternate theory points to well-documented vegetative changes during the long warming trend that followed the ice’s recession. In many areas, grasslands were replaced by thick forests, an impossible habitat for bulky mammoths. In the open country that did remain, a new vegetative mix may not have supplied the animals with the nutrition needed to sustain reproduction.
Most scientists today combine these two theories, painting a picture of diminishing populations of large mammals competing for water and food. Opportunistic hunting by humans, coupled with environmental stresses and a slow birth rate, may have pushed not only mammoths but other large grazing species such as camels and ground sloths past the point of recovery. A more complete understanding of the role of humans in mammoth extinction awaits further study; in the words of Thomas Condon, “A very lively interest will ever cluster around every new discovery of these fossils until this question is definitely settled.”
When Ben Coplen left Portland in the fall of 1876, he announced his intention to return home and continue excavating in preparation for a tour back East. Neighbors of the Coplens later recalled helping Ben with additional digs for a couple of years after his original find, and Alonzo remembered that he and Isaac and neighboring children played with bones stored in the barn, but apparently the plan for the tour never came to fruition. In 1879, a graduate student at McGill University exhibited a molar from the Coplen collection at a meeting of the Natural History Society of Montreal and read a paper comparing the specimens from Washington Territory to similar bones found in Canada, but the rest of the colossal fossils remained at Pacific University, according to W. D. Lyman, a teacher there and a friend of George Coplen. In an article written after a visit to Hangman Creek that same year, Lyman noted that it was still “the intention of the discoverers to pursue the investigation, so that specimens even more extraordinary than those already found may reward their search.” Whether there were no more spectacular bones to be found or whether other projects intervened is not known, but by 1883 Ben, Alonzo, and George were busy staking claims in the Coeur d’Alene silver district.
In the spring of 1886, the Chicago Academy of Sciences acquired seven hundred pounds of the Coplen mammoth bones for three hundred and fifty dollars. The cache included remains from four adults and the pelvis of a possibly unborn calf, but less than a whole animal. Over the course of the summer, Academy preparators sorted through the collection with the goal of a complete reconstruction. Leg bones were almost completely lacking; there were no lower teeth, and only a few fragments of a skull. The crew fashioned missing parts from plaster, using the remains of an Indian elephant as a model. Unveiled that fall, the skeleton represented the first full mount of a mammoth in North America.
At the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ meeting in October 1886, Professor W. K. Higley listed the most impressive measurements of the reconstruction, which stood thirteen feet tall. “It will be of interest,” the professor continued, “to compare the height of a few elephantine forms.” The famous Siberian woolly mammoth mounted in St. Petersburg rose a mere nine feet three inches. P. T. Barnum’s great attraction, the African elephant Jumbo, had been struck by a train in Toronto the previous year, and the circus magnate had assembled both a skeletal mount and a stuffed version to go back on the road. But even in his reconstructed glory, Jumbo measured only ten feet, three inches at the shoulder. A mounted Indian elephant at Northwestern University stood ten feet, eight inches. A giant mastodon displayed in Boston stretched to eleven feet. Therefore, Higley announced, the Chicago Academy of Sciences was the proud possessor of the largest known elephant in the world.
Around the same time that Higley was assembling his mount, a Spokane businessman named Isaac Peyton sought out Ben Coplen for an interview. Ben’s answers were informed and thorough, beginning with a report on the heavy concentrations of iron and nickel in the fossil-bearing spring. He said he had probed several additional springs around his original site and had found that four or five of them contained bones; he had taken ribs out of at least one of them, confirming his belief that “the quantity of bones remaining unexcavated is very great.” In a cryptic conclusion to notes that he forwarded to the president of the Chicago Academy, Peyton noted, “B. F. Coplen … Assist—probably charge nothing.” For Ben, evidently, the discovery had never lost its appeal. Later that winter, he regaled W. M. Lee, a visitor from Tacoma, with details of the original dig, took him to view the bog, and presented him with several souvenirs. Ben said that they had taken out “remains of a cave bear, and hyenas, extinct birds, and a sea turtle” in addition to parts of nine mammoths. There were still enough tusks around the homestead to overwhelm Lee with their magnitude. Some of them were worn away several inches deep at the bottom of their curve, he noticed, as if they had been constantly rubbed on the ground. “Just imagine,” Lee wrote, “far back in the misty bygones of antiquity, probably before the appearance of man on earth, that Washington territory was the home of the monstrous animals that roamed over the great prairies and traversed the Columbia River.”
There is no record of Benjamin Coplen or any of his brothers ever traveling to Chicago to admire the fruit of their labors. When the Latah mammoth served as the centerpiece of the Washington Pavilion at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893, Ben was celebrating the birth of a son and beginning his term as the first mayor of the newly incorporated town of Latah. He later tried the hotel business and, in 1901, moved with his family to Colorado Springs, Colorado. In December of that year, a Spokane newspaper ran an obituary lamenting that Latah’s honored citizen had been run over by a train in Colorado. The article was in error; Ben bounced up from the grave and returned to Latah.
In 1907 he moved across the state line to Plummer, Idaho, where his two sons worked for the railroad. Alonzo Coplen was pretty sure Ben took only a few of the mammoth parts with him, and that the last of the great bones were left behind in the homestead barn. It was in Plummer that Ben passed away for keeps in 1912. Two years later, the newly formed Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago purchased the Latah mammoth skeleton from the Chicago Academy and had it boxed and stored. After a half dozen years in storage, it was remounted and placed in the front hall of the Field Museum’s own grand exhibition.
While neither of the remarkable mammoth finds from the Palouse in the summer of 1876 fulfilled Thomas Condon’s wish that they remain in the Northwest, both have lived up to the Colfax observers’ prediction that they would prove to be of interest to science. The beautiful skull and other parts discovered by the Donahoe brothers on Pine Creek and carried to San Francisco by Nathaniel Thwing were purchased in 1878 by the paleontologist Edward Cope of Philadelphia. Two decades later, without ever opening the shipping crate, Cope sold them to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the 1920s and 1930s, taxonomists there measured and remeasured the Donahoe bones as they sorted out the different species of North American mammoths. Today the gigantic skull resides in the museum’s basement as landmark specimen No. 8681.
The Latah mammoth, meanwhile, has remained in sight and on the move. In the 1950s, Field Museum preparators completely reconstructed the skeleton, curling its metatarsals to assume a more natural, springy posture; in 1993, the mount was sawn apart and carried to a new exhibit space, where it was assembled yet again. There it was recently studied by a paleophysician who measured calcification in the bones and determined that the animal had suffered from arthritis in its toes. During museum hours the Coplen mammoth still occupies a central position in the Hall of Time; a crowd of kids is often gathered around the reconstruction, staring up at its impossible size.