William Stimpson and the Golden Age of American Natural History by Ronald Scott Vasile;

Author:Ronald Scott Vasile; [Vasile, Ronald Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609092405
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

CHAPTER 12

A FISH OUT OF WATER

In fast and friendly Chicago, weeks go by like days, and days like hours, and life is almost too rapid to be chronicled . . . all is astir here. There is no such thing as stagnation or rest. Lake-winds and prairie-winds keep the very air in commotion. You catch the contagion of activity and enterprise, and have wild dreams of beginning life again, and settling—no, circulating, whirling—in Chicago.

—Sara Clarke Lippincott (1871)1

While all the new additions to the museum barely dented the public consciousness, two events in late 1869 garnered a great deal of publicity for the Academy. At the October meeting John Wesley Powell, recently returned from his epochal voyage down the Colorado River, gave a stirring account of his recent exploration. As on Powell’s trip in 1867, the Academy had provided assistance in outfitting Powell, whose exploits captured the imagination of the American public and made him a hero. Stimpson had the difficult job of serving as the opening act that night, and his more scholarly report on Florida shell mounds was overshadowed by Powell’s adventure.2

Weeks later, Stimpson had his own moment in the spotlight. While on a buggy ride near his home in Oak Park, his discerning eye noticed a series of low mounds near the Des Plaines River. Having seen similar mounds in Florida he recognized them as man-made and returned with his neighbor Charles Kennicott, Robert Kennicott’s older brother, for an impromptu dig. (Charles suffered from mental illness and was eventually institutionalized as insane.) Over the course of several days they unearthed the remains of twenty individuals from a grouping of Native American burial mounds, including two complete skeletons. Stimpson noted that the bones were thrown together “promiscuously, as if the rites of sepulture had been hurried-perhaps at the close of a battle.” No tools or weapons were found in what came to be called the Stimpson Mound, and subsequent investigations revealed an even more extensive group of mounds about three miles north, dubbed the Kennicott Mounds.3

The Chicago papers gave extensive coverage to the finds. The Chicago Times proclaimed, “The sneer of European savans that America has no history is rapidly being refuted. . . . A discovery has just been made in the suburbs of Chicago which it is believed, will add much toward the solution of problems connected with the earliest inhabitants of North America.” Just a few weeks earlier the New York press had trumpeted the discovery of the “Cardiff Giant,” which some believed to be the petrified remains of a ten-foot-tall Indian. The Chicago Evening Journal claimed that Chicago would not be outdistanced by New York in the field of archaeology, and people in the Windy City were vastly amused to learn a few weeks later that the so-called giant was a hoax, perpetrated in part by a Chicagoan.4

The biggest debate in American archaeology in the 1850s and 1860s concerned Indian mounds, and at the next two Academy meetings John Wells Foster led the discussion.5 Foster

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