Countries are like sports teams: they love their mascots. Some are powerful, some are
adorable, and some are… completely fictional.
Wait, that’s real? If you say so!
Here in the United States? We picked this.
[ROCK AND ROLL!!]
But maybe it should have been this?
[MUSIC]
America’s first, and maybe most important scientific battle wasn’t the space race,
or the atom bomb… it was between Thomas Jefferson, a French nobleman, and in the middle,
a moose.
In America’s early days, science and nature were actually part of everyday life. Reading
the weather, finding game, knowing which plants were poisonous… these were literally matters
of life and death.
[EAGLE SCREAMING]
But across the Atlantic, science was still mostly for folks with fancy names, like this
guy. The Count of Buffon was a celebrity, we’re
talking Carl Sagan-in-a-powdered-wig-level famous.
His natural history books were the must-haves for anyone who wanted their friends to think
they were smart. Problem was, Buffon hated the New World that
was the Americas, and wasn’t afraid to say so
In his books, the Count laid out his “Theory of American Degeneracy”, or “Why the Old
World is #1 According to Science”. His arguments went something like this:
All of Earth’s mightiest species lived in the Old World.
Animals common to both continents were smaller and weaker in America.
Our birds didn’t sing, our dogs were too dumb to bark, even domesticated animals would
become stupider, smaller, and less delicious when brought to America.
Despite never actually going to the New World, Buffon convinced everyone that it was a cold
and swampy wasteland and anyone who settled there would see their very humanity degrade.
This was a problem. In order to succeed, young America needed three things from its friends
across the Atlantic: Guns, goods, and people. One of Europe’s most famous thinkers publicly
besmirching their reputation was not helping.
Enter Thomas Jefferson. In between writing the Declaration of Independence,
being Governor of Virginia, evading the British army, and being foreign minister to France,
Jefferson found a surprising amount of time to do science, his true calling.
Jefferson answered Buffon’s claims with his own book showing that our animals weren’t
smaller, and that America actually possessed more species.
Wait a sec… does that say mammoth?
Since the mid-1700s, people had been digging huge tusks and spiked teeth out of the ground
in Kentucky: the mysterious remains of a giant monster called “The Incognitum”.
Jefferson had heard of similar elephant-like bones from Siberia with a more familiar name:
The Mammoth!
Except mammoths never lived in America. Jefferson’s were actually mastodon bones, but since he
didn’t know that, he called it a mammoth. Very confusing.
Buffon examined those bones, and declared Jefferson’s “American Mammoth” was really
just a regular elephant, and those spiky, very non-elephant teeth came from a hippopotamus
that died on top of it. Totally logical.
Even worse, Buffon said the New World was just so horrible and cold that the American
elephant had given up, died off, and gone extinct.
But Jefferson, like most scientists of his time, didn’t believe in extinction. He thought
mastodons and giant sloths were still alive, just out West. He even told Lewis and Clark
to keep an eye out for them.
Jefferson’s fossils turned out to be a mammoth flop, but he had one more idea. No more fossils,
no books, he would hand deliver a still-surviving giant, America’s mightiest ungulate, a 7-foot
tall moose. Preferably stuffed.
Since Jefferson was living in France, his friend General John Sullivan made it his personal
mission to procure the animal on Jefferson’s behalf.
Three years passed, and the moose tally remained at zero.
Finally in the winter of 1787, Sullivan and his men killed a 7-foot-tall moose, dragging
it through the Vermont wilderness with their bare hands.
Sullivan boxed up the bones and antlers, arranged for a ship to carry it to France and… accidentally
left it behind on the dock.
When Jefferson heard this, he began to lose hope. On September 28, 1787 he wrote that
he was ready to give up his moose-terpiece of a plan.
Just two days later, a crate was unloaded in Northern France. Contents: One moose, with
antlers, addressed to Mr. Thomas Jefferson.
TJ had the moose’s remains shipped to Buffon’s estate immediately. According to Jefferson,
when the Count saw the moose bones, he instantly realized the error of his ways, and promised
that in the next edition of his Natural History, he would declare that his theory of degeneracy
was WRONG, once and for all.
Except there would be no next edition. Within months, the Count was dead.
But America’s own artists came to her defense. Washington Irving attacked Buffon’s ideas
in the same book that gave us the stories “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”.
Thoreau says that he “speaks a word for Nature” in his essay “Walking”.
By the mid 1800’s the idea of New World degeneracy was dead. Unfortunately, so was
Thomas Jefferson.
His moose may not have won the battle against Buffon, but it was his quest for that great
animal and his westward exploration in search of a living mastodon, that gave birth to an
American identity, a sense of national pride, a bountiful land of unbridled opportunity
and that special brand of American swagger.
Thomas Jefferson: a politician, who was really a scientist, who fought for America’s moose.
Stay curious.
If you want to know more about this story, it's one of my favorite science stories of
all time, check out the book "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose" by Lee Dugatkin.
Link down in the description.