“Too Poetical a Theory”: Antiquarian Ambition, East and West

A few years after the conclusion of the Kentucky Mummy affair, Isaiah Thomas received a packet postmarked Circleville, Ohio—a town built within the remnants of the vast enclosure that had been emblematic of the perception of antiquities shared by the first generation of pioneers. It contained . . . two or three species of cloth, manufactured and worn by the people who erected our tumuli . . . These are fragments of the clothing found on mummies in the nitrous caves . . . [a] small, yet valuable addition to the Society’s cabinet. . . . By 1820 only limited evidence remained in the West of the desiccated burials that had recently stirred the imagination of American antiquarians and the public. The record does not tell us whether Moses Fisk ever located other artifacts from Caney Branch, or what happened to those he kept for himself. One of the associated mummies still resided in John Clifford’s Lexington cabinet, and there were undoubtedly other fragments dispersed in antiquarian collections throughout the western country, but the narrative about the history that these remains represented had been permanently disrupted. Yet even these scanty relics were restless. Just as the Kentucky Mummy herself represented cultural capital for the various “national” institutions, so the pieces of cloth and the forlorn body parts played their own symbolic role, connecting modern identity and indigenous past on the frontier. These relics circulated among western antiquarians, talismans both of material history and of membership in a community of inquiry. Thomas’s Circleville correspondent was Caleb Atwater. He had only recently come to the attention of the antiquarian world, courtesy of an 1817 western tour made by President James Monroe that included a brief stop in the mound country. Atwater met Monroe on the trip, and—in response to a presidential request—published a commentary on antiquities in the American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review that was apparently read in Worcester. Perhaps a favorable reference to the Mummy caught their eye: a month after the article appeared Atwater had been elected as a member.