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Feral Bodies, Feral Nature: Wild Men in America By Erik D. Anderson B.A., Grinnell College, 2001 A.M., Brown University, 2004 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 © Copyright 2009 by Erik D. Anderson II This dissertation by Erik D. Anderson is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date__________ __________________________________ Karl Jacoby, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________ __________________________________ Elliott Gorn, Reader Date__________ ___________________________________ Nancy Jacobs, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________ ___________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School III VITA Erik D. Anderson was born on June 21, 1979 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He attended Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where he received a B.A. with honors in History and Political Science. He received his A.M. from Brown University in 2004. He has taught courses in U.S. and African history at the University of Rhode Island, Bristol Community College/University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and Brown University. IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the result of the hard work of a great number of people. My advisor, Karl Jacoby, has been a constant source of advice and encouragement throughout my graduate career. He has helped me explore the possibilities of this dissertation and warned me of its many pitfalls. I want to thank Elliott Gorn for his guidance and support. When I told him I wanted to go ahead with this project, he said that it was the type of thing he would have done when he was in graduate school—I am still not sure if he thought that was a good thing. I want to thank Nancy Jacobs for all the encouragement and insight she has given me while working on this project, but also for introducing me to a whole new field, mentoring me as a teacher, and being someone I could always talk to on the way up the stairs. I want to thank all the other teachers and mentors I have had at Brown: Amy Remensnyder, Deborah Cohen, Mari Jo Buhle, Caroline Karp, and Gordon Wood. I also want to thank my mentors at Grinnell College: Marci Sortor, Sarah Purcell, and Pablo Silva. I also want to say thank you to all the teachers from the Stamford, Connecticut public schools who saw my potential. It is a testament to their skill and patience as educators that a learning disabled student such as myself, one whom many believed could not go to college, could go on to earn a doctorate. I want to thank the many archivists at institutions great and small who helped me with my research. In particular, I want to thank the archivists at the University of Texas V Center for American History; Tennessee State Archives and Library; McMinn County Historical Society; Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo; the Monroe County Public Library; the Cincinnati Historical Association; and the Ohio State Library. This dissertation was made possible by the financial support of Brown University. A number of colleagues read sections of my dissertation and I want to thank them for their comments and suggestions: Françoise N. Hamlin and all of the Southern Historians in New England workshop members; Kenneth Davis and the Texas Culture Association; and Michelle Kleehammer, Marsha Weisiger, and Kelly Roark from ASEH. I want to thank my many colleagues in the Brown University Department of History for their support. Gabriel Rosenberg spent many hours listening and offering suggestions on this project. This project, and my time at Brown, would have been much less without him as a colleague and friend. Mark Robbins offered help and guidance on research, writing, teaching and piscine matters. Finally, I want to thank Gill Frank, not only for introducing me to the subject of my fifth chapter, but also to my partner. I want to thank my parents, Lois Anderson and David Anderson, for their support and love over all these years. Finally, this dissertation could not have been completed without Allie Hartry. She read every word of this dissertation at least twice and would make a far better historian than I. More importantly, she has been my love and companion. She has been my constant source of support and happiness. VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION. 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Wild People of the Navidad. 16 CHAPTER TWO: The Genealogy the American Wild Man. 59 CHAPTER THREE: The Wild Woman of the Wachita and 92 the Wild Man of Tennessee: Medicine and Environmentalism. CHAPTER FOUR: Mason Evans/ The Wild Man of the Chilhowee. 124 CHAPTER FIVE: Wild and Queer: Lucy Anne /Joseph Israel Lobdell. 171 CHAPTER SIX: The Evolution the American Wild Man. 189 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Devolution of the Wild Man. 225 CONCLUSION. 259 Bibliography 264 VII INTRODUCTION. In March of 1851, two hunters spotted a drove of cattle in a “state of apparent alarm, evidently pursed by some dread enemy.” The hunters stopped and watched as an “animal bearing the unmistakable likeness of humanity” appeared behind the cattle, giving chase. The creature was “of gigantic stature, the body being covered with hair and the head with long lock which covered his head... his footprints were thirteen inches long.” Hunters and sportsmen in the region knew him as the Wild Man of Arkansas and believed him to be “a survivor of the earthquake which desolated that region in 1811.” Losing his family in the earthquake, the future Wild Man found himself “thrown helpless upon the wilderness by that disaster.” The orphaned child thus “grew up in a savage state, until he now bears only the outward resemblance to humanity.”1 In the winter of 1856, the Wild Man's path again crossed that of “civilized men” when a party of hunters with dogs caught a glimpse of him near the Red River and gave chase. Desperately trying to escape the dogs, the Wild Man ran out onto a small frozen lake. He fell through the ice and began to swim and wade across, cracking the thin ice as he surged forward. One of his pursuers circled around the lake on horseback and set an ambush for him in the thick brush. As the Wild Man crawled out of the lake, the hunter laid down his gun and set upon him, hoping to capture him alive. Feet away from his 1 “A Wild Man of the Woods,” Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette, May 26, 1851, 1. 1 goal, the hunter was later able to describe the Wild Man as “a stout and athletic man, about six feet four inches in height, covered in hair of a brownish caste about four to six inches long.” Cornered by the hunter, the Wild Man turned on his pursuer, grabbing him and violently throwing him to the ground. First ripping off the saddle and reins, the Wild Man jumped upon the hunter’s horse and galloped off. One of the hunter's companions attended to his injuries, while the others, along with a band of “friendly Indians,” set off to continue their pursuit of the creature.2 Powerful and covered in hair, the Wild Man of Arkansas was but one of many men and women whom nineteenth-century Americans believed to have the misfortune of suffering the degenerative power of nature. That power stripped away their humanity, leaving man-beasts condemned to live out wild lives in the wilderness that had created them. Americans called these creatures Wild Men or, depending on the being's age and gender, Wild Children or Wild Women. The defining characteristics of Wild Men were their hairy bodies, wilderness abode, and great physical strength. They often carried a stick or club, ate raw or “uncivilized” foods, and lacked speech and other perceived signs of civilization and culture. Though the adjunctive “wild” was almost universally used by Americans from the eighteenth to early twentieth century, the term is somewhat misleading in describing the nature of Wild Men. American Wild Men like the Wild Man of Arkansas could better be described as feral rather than wild, for their condition was not inherent or permanent. It was not that they had never known human civilization or had never inhabited domesticated landscapes, but that they had become dislocated from those places and forces that kept 2 “The Wild Man Again,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1856, 1. 2 men civilized and human. Thus the difference between a man and a Wild Man was not like the difference between a domesticated dog and a wolf. It was closer to the difference between a domesticated dog and a domesticated dog that had grown up outside the care of human beings. A Wild Man was a man who became wild, not one for whom wildness was an original state. Wildness, and its physical manifestations—such as a body covered with hair and endowed with great strength—lay over the “normal” man beneath. Thus there remained the possibility that, exposed to a civilized environment, the Wild Man would revert back to being simply a man. While these beings may be better described as feral people, I have chosen to use the term Wild Man, as that was how almost all Americans referred to these beings and is the term most often used in the secondary literature on the topic. Further, following the general historic usage of “man” or “men” to describe individuals regardless of sex or age, I have used the broader term Wild Men to include all types of Wild People unless a particular individual was described by a historic source as a Wild Woman, Wild Girl or Wild Boy.3 I have also chosen to capitalize the term Wild Man, even if it was not always done in the source material, in order to differentiate the figure that is the subject of this work from a normal person merely described as wild.

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