Antiquarian Entrepreneurs: Mounds and Meaning in the Jacksonian Era

In his 1838 Peter Pilgrim, or a Rambler’s Recollections, Robert Bird noted the abundant evidence for ancient human activity in the caverns of the western country, with the associated ironies of modern exploitation: . . . it is quite plain that the Mammoth Cave was once the dwelling-place of man—of a race of the Anakim, as some will have it, whose bones were disinterred in the vestibule . . . The tribe has vanished, and their bones (to what base uses we may return!) converted into gunpowder, have been employed to wing many a death against their warring descendants. . . . Although he included a garbled account of the Caney Branch mummies— “petrified ancients”—Bird did not mention the Kentucky Mummy herself. Thus her transformation over twenty-odd years into an archaeological icon, and then into institutional capital, also effectively obscured the intimate connection between those remains and their place of origin. Indeed, refractions of the discovery can be found in the broader American literature of the 1830s. William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 short story “The Skeleton in the Cave” adapts literary gothic imagery to a distinctively American setting, which features caverns and bones. Over time, however, the Kentucky Mummy reappeared in lore specific to Mammoth Cave itself. Visitors saw sites associated with the Mummy, variously along the “Gothic Avenue” or in the “Haunted Chamber.” A complex web of tales developed of bodies excavated, reburied, or lost, of Indian children long dead but perfectly preserved. Tours stopped at a niche associated with the Mummy and took “time for reverie. It cost me no coaxing to have mine,” wrote Nathaniel Parker Willis; “of all the ladies of past ages I doubt whether there is one who is the subject of a more perpetual series of unwritten poems.” The 1840s invention of traditions concerning the Kentucky Mummy reflects a deepening of the relationship between settlers and the western landscape, which with time and familiarity had evolved from a featureless wilderness into a place with history and meaning.