In 1781, Thomas Jefferson Looks to the West and the Discovery of Unidentified Bones at America’s First Paleontological Site

This famous letter, the first by any American president on the subject of fossils or paleontology, was hand delivered by Daniel Boone

 

Jefferson, stepping down as Virginia governor, says he will use his time on scientific pursuits like paleontology: “The retirement into which I am withdrawing has increased my eagerness in pursuit of objects of this kind.”

 

Formerly at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; never before offered for sale publicly

Thomas Jefferson is one of America’s first great naturalists. He commissioned the first official paleontological dig in the United States. He sent Lewis and Clark west not only to look for a passage west but also to find specimens of animals living and dead. Those specimens, which include extinct species, are now at the Academy of Sciences.

But before Jefferson’s interests in this subject formed the basis of our American passion decades earlier.

A boneyard from the late Pleistocene, which was a warm salt spring, gathering-place, death trap and eons-long tomb for mammals of many descriptions, was situated at the southern margin of the last great ice cap. It had been known to Shawnees and Lenape Delawares for millennia. Euro-American civilization had known of it only since 1739, when French soldiers stationed nearby sent skeletal curios back to Paris.

An Englishman George Croghan had taken a western trip in 1765 to the boneyard location at Bone Lick, where he picked up two six-foot tusks and several other fossil bones, but when he and his party were attacked by Indians a few days later and the survivors were taken captive, Croghan understandably lost his paleontological trophies. He returned to the region in June 1766, however, accompanied by Captain Harry Gordon of the British Army and George Morgan of the Philadelphia firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. The party revisited Big Bone Lick and Croghan and Morgan each collected a number of bones, which they succeeded in taking back with them to the East Coast.

When Croghan reached New York by sea via New Orleans and Pensacola early in January 1767, he decided to send his collection of fossils to England as gifts, partly to Lord Shelburne, secretary of state, and partly to his old friend Benjamin Franklin. In February, while the fossils were still in New York, not yet packed for shipment, an unidentified “G.W.” saw them and, as he later reported, “several Gentlemen, who had [had] the Opportunity of seeing Ivory Tusks in Africa, and elsewhere, pronounced these, Elephant’s Teeth.”

Franklin wrote to Croghan on August 5, 1767, thanking him for the gift and commenting on it. He, like others, was puzzled at the discovery of what certainly seemed to resemble the tusks of African and Asiatic elephants in a region where the climate was much too cold for those animals to live. The finding of similar tusks in Siberia, added to this Bone Lick discovery near the Ohio River, led Franklin to suggest that at some earlier time the earth had “been in another position, and the climates differently placed from what they are at present.”

In 1781, Thomas Jefferson, the Revolutionary War still going, stepped down from his position as Governor of Virginia. He set about his natural inquiries, which included writing “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Jefferson had heard of these bizarre bones discovered in Kentucky. His mind was on the West, as well as on science, where it would land with the Lewis and Clark expedition, and he believed that these animals were alive still and roamed the unexplored regions of the vast country.

Meanwhile, Daniel Boone, in 1775, had blazed through Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky. There he founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. Boone served as a militia officer during the War, which, in Kentucky, was fought primarily between American settlers and British-allied American Indians. Boone was taken in by Shawnees in 1778 and adopted into the tribe, but he resigned and continued to help protect the Kentucky settlements. He was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General Assembly during the war, and in 1781 set out to Richmond to join the Assembly of Virginia there.

George Rogers Clark is remembered as the heroic Revolutionary War commander who led a small force of frontiersmen through the freezing waters of the Illinois country to capture British-held Fort Sackville at Vincennes during February 1779. Making this victory especially sweet was that he had vanquished British Lieut. Governor Henry Hamilton, who was known as the “hair buyer” because of his policy of paying Britain’s American Indian allies for American scalps. Clark captured Hamilton and he was taken in chains to Williamsburg, Virginia, to the glee of the Americans. Clark continued his exertions on behalf of the American cause in the West during the entire war. These efforts included building forts on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, repelling a British-led Indian attack in the Illinois country, and leading two major expeditions that destroyed the British-allied Shawnee towns in the Ohio country. In the same way that William Henry Harrison was largely responsible for saving the West in the War of 1812, Clark has that accolade in the Revolution.

In 1781, Jefferson had promoted George Rogers Clark to brigadier general and given him command of all the militia in the Kentucky and Illinois counties.

Autograph letter signed, December 19, 1781, to Clark, hand delivered by Daniel Boone. “Having an opportunity by Colo. Boon I take the liberty of calling to your mind your kindness in undertaking to procure for me some teeth of the great animal whose remains are found on the Ohio. Were it possible to get a tooth of each kind, that is to say a foretooth, grinder &c. it would particularly oblige me. Perhaps you know some careful person at Fort Pitt with whom they might be safely lodged till our Mathematicians go out in the spring to settle the Pennsylvania boundary, who could readily bring them in for me in their baggage waggon. I believe we spoke of the expediency of securing them in a box. I hope you will pardon the freedom I take in being so minute. The retirement into which I am withdrawing has increased my eagerness in pursuit of objects of this kind. Hoping the acquaintance I had the pleasure of making with you was not merely official…”

Provenance: From Leonard Bliss, Jr, officer of the Kentucky Historical Society and a scholar of Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark; to Royal Navy officer and novelist and acquaintance of Charles Dickens Frederick Marryat; to the the American Museum of Natural History; to a private owner; to Raab.

There is no letter of any American president in published works prior to this letter mentioning these fossils. Indeed this is the first published letter of Jefferson mentioning his attempts to acquire fossils. The only letters prior to this of any consequence are in the hand of Benjamin Franklin.

This letter has never before been offered for sale publicly and has been in the same family for nearly half a century. The Monticello website includes this letter as “one of the origins of the Lewis and Clark expedition.”