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.

“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.

“Mementos of the Prehistoric Races”: Antiquarians and Archaeologists in the Centennial Decade

The long Worcester slumber of the Kentucky Mummy came to an end in 1875, with a letter to Joseph Henry from Samuel Haven, then in his fourth decade as Librarian of the American Antiquarian Society. “Nearly a year ago,” Haven wrote, “I received from you a request that the mummy (so called) from a cave in Kentucky, which had for many years been in possession of this Society, should be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution . . . I therefore . . . now feel at liberty to forward the body by express; hoping that you may find it convenient to make such return in exchange as seems proper.” Thus the Kentucky Mummy was packed up and sent south—by train, rather than by wagon, as in her northward journey—with little fanfare at either end. It is uncertain whether the return exchange was completed, but the episode provided an opportunity to highlight the Antiquarian Society’s collections, and perhaps thereby its priority in the study of the indigenous past. Earlier in 1875 the Society had called the attention of the membership to the display of antiquities in its halls. “Anything connected with the North American Indians is deemed worthy of the study of the antiquary,” noted the Council’s report, pointing out that even remains from lowly shell heaps “make known the character of their food with all the certainty of a bill of fare at the Parker House.” The same note, however, also acknowledged that the center of gravity for North American archaeology in New England had definitively shifted away from Worcester. The establishment of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard in 1866 was the initial cause of this realignment, which provided for scholarship a new venue, relatively unburdened by institutional culture. The museum’s first curator, Jeffries Wyman, died in 1874 and was replaced by a younger and more ambitious man, Frederic Ward Putnam. In the same year the Council of the Antiquarian Society was joined by Stephen Salisbury III, a dynamic patron with interests in the ancient Maya. With new leaders, the two institutions moved in different directions.

Idol Pursuits: Artifacts and Authority after the Civil War

A particularly baroque literary appearance of the Kentucky Mummy highlights the transformation of public perceptions of indigenous antiquities in the United States in the Civil War decade. An imaginary romance of Mammoth Cave, Legends of the South (Smith 1869), describes a mysterious, annual journey of a “venerable Indian” down into the cavern. Ultimately the old man disappears into its depths, never to return. Decades later the author pursues the subterranean trail, encountering marvels that include the warning Siste viator—“Stop, traveler”— chalked on the cave wall. Nearby he finds the deceased elder, reduced to a “mummy-like dessication” clad in deerskin. Armed with an amulet taken from the body he pushes onward, ultimately entering a vast sepulcher in which . . . lay the warrior tribe, in their panoply complete. Supine—with their hands crossed upon their breasts, with their faces turned upward, as if acknowledging the presence of a superior being, they lay, like the marble effigies of the knights of old upon their sarcophagi. . . . In this catacomb the author is haunted by a ghostly “Sachem” who chides: “Are you not satisfied that your cruel warfare has exterminated us from the surface of the earth? Must you follow us to these chambers of death to scatter our ashes?” The supernatural figure then describes the wars of his dead people, prophesying that those events would be repeated in post-Civil War United States. “Nations from the rising sun shall make war upon the conquerors,” he pronounces “and then shall the Southern panther rise from his lair, and avenge his wrongs.” This subterranean tale amplified the myriad accounts of the Kentucky Mummy—a discovery two generations in the past by that time. By the mid-nineteenth century such visions of indigenous antiquity were increasingly commonplace, but the linkage between these histories and current events indicate increasingly deep associations with the American landscape. It was not simply abstract indigenous history that was being co-opted, however, but the material legacy of that experience—the ruins and artifacts that were ubiquitous in the increasingly populated countryside.

“These places know him no more”: Surveys, Panoramas, and the Landscape of Ancient America

Around 1850 an image of a mysterious cavern in the western country was painted on a vast stretch of canvas. It depicts an elaborate, subterranean realm with colorful stalactites, exotic mineral formations, and an enigmatic hieroglyphic inscription. The darkness is illumined by the flaming brands of a party of explorers, who move about in active curiosity. In the shadows beyond the torchlight a trio of mummies can be seen, propped up against the rocks. The Kentucky Mummy—and a few of her peers—patiently await the attention of Investigators. The description attached to the painting, however, suggests that its object is not Mammoth Cave, but another western grotto, located in a bluff alongside the Ohio known as Cave-in-Rock. In actuality there were no stalactites at this particular location, and no evidence for antiquities either. Early in the era of western exploration the cavern had been used as shelter by travelers: the walls were indeed inscribed, but—like the trees that had once risen atop the Grave Creek Mound—with the signatures of those passing through rather than with those of the ancient inhabitants. More infamously, the cave had been used by river pirates as a base for attacks on flatboat passengers. Eastern newspapers had carried accounts of the banditti of Cave-in-Rock. Thomas Ashe included the cave among his bone-filled catacombs, and a newspaper article of a few years later described the place as a “dark mansion of the murdered.” John Egan’s romanticized depiction of Cave-in-Rock—executed on behalf of Montroville Dickeson—illustrates the complex accretion of historicized landscapes in the American West in the era prior to the Civil War. For the mid-nineteenth-century audience such palimpests were relatively commonplace, representing the increasing time depth of settlement and the progressive integration of different types of historical experience. That the painter had apparently never seen the place itself was irrelevant: his canvas artfully joined the ancient dead with the casualties of more recent times, connecting past and present in equal degree, within a mythicized western setting. The nature of Egan’s work itself indicated that visual imagery was a potentially powerful strategy for engaging the material past in the antebellum United States.

Antiquarian Dreams: Collections and Competition in the Early Republic

Tales of unusual discoveries made in the limestone caverns of Tennessee and Kentucky began to circulate in the first decade of the nineteenth century. According to Samuel Brown, a doctor based in Lexington, the underground realms presented “scenes so uncommon and so romantic, that the most stupid beholder cannot contemplate them without expressions of the greatest astonishment.” Rather than scholars, however, those delving in the depths were typically miners seeking saltpeter for gunpowder production and other minerals, in the process exposing evidence of earlier visitors to the caves, animal and human. Exploration and exploitation were thus inextricably linked. Brown’s dispatch from the West was accompanied by the bones of fossil mammals and, as if by afterthought, “also an earthen cup, probably Indian, (broken in the carriage).” The significance of fragmentary ground sloths and “the bones of the head of the peccary of South America” found in the caves was debated, but the slight traces of human presence in those subterranean realms also provoked comment. John Clifford, another resident of Lexington, interpreted such ephemeral signs at one location as suggesting that the cave to had . . . been inhabited either by a horde of troglodytes or . . . the scene of some religious mysteries . . . Dead bodies have been found which when first seen were apparently as perfect as at the period when deposited there. . . . “It would be a great desideratum,” he concluded, “to see one of these bodies.” And yet the value to scholarship of the discoveries made in western caves was debatable. The utility of relics as a means to understand the history of the American continent was not universally acknowledged. The scholarly apparatus for pursuing such investigations was meager as well. In particular, the ephemeral character of the community of inquiry interested in the material past—dispersed, divided by class and association, subject to disruption through constant mobility, poor communication, and personal rivalries—had a profound impact on how such relics might be used.

“Lost by Being Found”: The Public and the Material Past in the Nineteenth-Century United States

In the flurry of activity following the Centennial Exposition, the Kentucky Mummy’s onward journey to Washington went unremarked. Her addition to the national collection was eventually acknowledged in the Smithsonian’s annual report for 1876, without further comment. Cryptic references to this item’s new status can be found in institutional memoranda over the next few years: “Dr. Rau has the mummy on exhibition in first case to the left as you enter his hall,” reads one such note. But in the wilderness of artifacts at the Smithsonian there was little space for nostalgia, and the Mummy does not seem to have attracted the notice of the Washington audience. The implicit alignment of perspectives between local antiquarians and Smithsonian scholars at the end of the 1870s—that the documentation of archaeological evidence was fundamentally tied to experience on the ground, demonstrating the need for local knowledge and widespread cooperation—did not, however, affect the trajectory of archaeological practice in the United States. The implications of the deep files in Mason’s office remained largely unremarked. The passing of this opportunity for archaeological synthesis testifies perhaps more to inadequate institutional frameworks than to conceptual shortcomings. The Smithsonian’s efforts to collect information on American antiquity in the 1870s differed only in detail and scale from the correspondence of the American Antiquarian Society in the 1810s. In both cases—and in many others launched during the intervening years—an institution sought to acquire antiquarian capital through a network of collaborators, exchanging prestige and modest access for information and associated commodities. In the context of the late nineteenth century, however, the failures of such approaches were more evident than their episodic successes, and the sense that opportunities to understand the American past had been squandered was widespread. The words of Moses Fisk, published in 1820, could describe the antiquarian enterprise of his and subsequent generations. “It is to be regretted,” he wrote, “that these ancient ruins and relicks have been exposed to so much depredation. Valuable articles are lost by being found.”

The Kentucky Mummy: Encountering the American Past

In September 1816 a notice appeared in the National Aegis of Worcester, Massachusetts: . . . Great Natural Curiosity TO BE SEEN AT COL. SIKE’S HALL A FEMALE MUMMY . . . Supposed to be more than 1,000 years old. She was recently discovered in a Saltpetre Cave, in Kentucky. At the time, she was shrouded in cloth made from the bark of the willow, and ornamented with beads and feathers, having her instruments for working and musick lying by her; as was also a very curious wooden bowl, containing burnt bones, the relics of some of her friends, and the preserved skin of a Rattle Snake— all of which are preserved, and now presented to the view of the curious. She appears to have been about 5 feet 8 inches in height, and of the most delicate and elegant symmetry. The hair is still on her head; some of her teeth yet remain, and the nails on her fingers and toes are still perfect. It is presumed that she, together with the articles found with her, is one of the greatest curiosities ever exhibited to the American public. Great conjectures are formed as to the period of her existence; but we presume it is no exaggeration to say that, in all probability she is as ancient as the immense Mounds of the western Country, which have so astonished the philosophical world. The arrival of the Kentucky Mummy—on view for only two weeks, at a visitor’s price of 25 cents—was the culmination of a summer of antiquarian excitement along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Journalists, poets, and impresarios were moved by the sight. Scholars schemed to acquire the mummy for their cabinets and scrutinized the withered remains for clues as to her origins and associations. But it was the interest of the general audience that made her progress particularly noteworthy. “All you gentlemen and ladies,” announced a Philadelphia newspaper, “have the opportunity to gratify yourselves and behold this rare curiosity.” The history of Euro-American encounters with the indigenous antiquities of the Americas is remarkably incomplete.