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.

The idea that Wild Men were feral people is also useful for understanding the

American Wild Man, because it differentiates him from the savage in Euro-American

culture. While the feral American Wild Man was a normal person who underwent a

transformation in which he lost his relationship with humanity, the savage was simply a

3 I considered using the gender- and age-neutral term “Wild People” as a catch-all phrase, but my research has revealed only one primary source that uses that term. I wish to maintain the original sources’ understandings of these feral people in their original context as well as the sources’ gender biases and assumptions. 3 human being who was and remained a member of a culture others deemed different or inferior. Unlike the Wild Man, the savage state was not arrived at by a process of transformation, but rather one that was constantly inhabited. This distinction was illustrated by Ezra Sampson, writing in the Connecticut Courant in 1809. According to

Sampson,

The wild man of the woods can run as fast as the four-footed animals with which he associates; and sometimes, it is said, runs them down and seizes them as his prey. A savage who depends upon his bow has not the swiftness of the wild man.4

The key difference between the Wild Man and the savage, as understood by Europeans and Euro-Americans, was between a being existing outside of culture—thus only associating with animals and whose body has changed as a result—and one who existed within a foreign cult—thus possessing tools. While the occasional author or poet would confuse the issue for literary effect by referring to Native Americans as wild men rather than savages, most Euro-American placed them in the latter category.

What complicates this distinction is that another type of savage was also present in American culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, one which

Americans also referred to as Wild Men. These savage Wild Men were beings who, due to their cultural, racial and geographical distance from white Americans, were commonly exhibited in cities at commercial locations like circuses or dime museums. These savage

Wild Men were acts, organized by showmen like P.T. Barnum and put on by disabled persons like the Davis brothers, who played the Wild Men of Borneo, or William Henry

Johnson, who played the “What is it?” These savage Wild Men were a “performance of

4 Ezra Sampson, Connecticut Courant, August 23, 1809, 1.

4 otherness,” displays of monstrosity that resulted in the confirmation of the normalcy of

American identity as white, male and middle class. The exhibition of a savage being created an “other” against which Americans could read and understand white identity.5

It is not these sideshow savage Wild Men, but the feral Wild Men like the Wild

Man of Arkansas, who are the subject of this project. Scholars have paid close attention to the savage Wild Men in U.S. culture and have used them to explore discourses of race, gender, empire, civilization and body.6 But they have largely ignored the feral Wild Man.

This gap in the scholarship is unfortunate because a study of the feral Wild Man can enrich the narrative of U.S. cultural and environmental history by revealing an American discourse about human nature that incorporates not only race, gender, and the human body, but also wilderness, wildness, law, degeneration, and the environmental construction of human nature.

The American Wild Man was an idea, but that did not mean it lacked a real existence. So common were Wild Man sightings in nineteenth-century America that in

1871 the New York Times commented that a Wild Man had appeared every year since the

5 Philip McGowan, American Carnival: Seeing and Reading American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 1-4.

6 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.) McGowan, American Carnival. Thomas Richard Fahy, Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume Phillips, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

5 start of that century.7 In communities across the nation, from western borderlands to old eastern municipalities, Americans saw beings whom they understood to be Wild Men or

Wild Women. When they encountered such creatures, they reacted spectacularly, fleeing in terror, hunting them down, and in some cases capturing the beings. So powerful was the idea of Wild Men that some American communities saw actual human beings, often those on the margins of society such as escaped slaves, vagrants and the mentally ill, as

Wild Men with the creature’s characteristics. I have called this process of seeing an actual human being as a Wild Man “inscribing,” for it invokes the way in which an idea, in this case that of Wild Men, became written onto the body of a person. The results of this inscribing were often violent attempts at redeeming those seen as Wild Men from the wilderness that was believed to transform them.

The first chapter explores one of the earliest, most prominent and longest lasting of the Wild Man stories, the Wild People of the Navidad. Using newspapers stories, personal reminiscences, local histories and archival material, the chapter analyzes why the residents of Jackson County, Texas believed their landscape was inhabited by a Wild

Woman or a group of Wild People in the years surrounding the Texas Revolution. I argue that the Anglo-American settlers who arrived at the western edge of Stephen Austin's

Texas colony in 1830 sought to transform a landscape they understood as wilderness into a fertile agrarian community. Uprooted by the calamitous events of the Texas Revolution, they experienced great hardship. Refusing to believe that their environment was still inhabited by Native Americans, they developed a set of narratives to explain the strange beings that left footprints and stole their food and tools. Those narratives, some of which

7“What Is It?,” New York Times, April 26, 1871, 4.

6 postulated that white women or children had degenerated into Wild People, and others which identified the creature as a wild African, reveal the way that racial and gender discourses shaped and were shaped by ways in which a struggling frontier community understood the relationship between environment and civilization.

The second chapter seeks to uncover the roots of Wild Men by exploring Wild

Man stories in Native American, African American and most prominently in European culture. I trace the genealogy of the Wild Man through these cultures to early America.

Finally, I turn to Wild Men from two works of antebellum literature to illustrate how

American Wild Man stories differ from those of Europe.

In the third chapter, I use two actual encounters between Wild Men and physicians to argue that American environmentalism undergirded the belief in Wild Men.

Environmentalism shaped the practice of medicine for much of the nineteenth century. In

1856, the probate court of Cincinnati convened a hearing and called on several of the city's leading physicians to determine if the “Wild Woman of the Wachita,” who had been exhibited in the city, was “a Wild Woman, a maniac, or an actor.” In post-Civil War

Louisville, physicians’ abilities to diagnose a reputed Wild Man with a hereditary skin disease signaled a move away from medical specificity and environmentalism.

The fourth chapter chronicles the life of Mason K. Evans, who came to be seen by the authorities and local governments in southeastern Tennessee as an object of both care and violence during the fifty years he roamed that region’s hills and mountains. In his youth, Evans was a respected member of the community and a teacher in the county school. In the early 1840s, Evans went Wild. While his family remained in the area, they protected and provided for him. But when family members died or moved away from the

7 region, Evans became vulnerable to violence and dehumanization. Newspapers came to describe him as a hairy Wild Man. The county authorities subjected him to a mixture of care and cruelty, sometimes providing him clothing and other times leaving him chained in isolated cabins. Some county residents attacked Evans and twice individuals captured

Evans and displayed him for a fee. Other county residents sought to protect Evans and his identity as a human being. The chapter uses the work of legal historian William Novak, the concept of pastoral power developed by Michael Foucault, and Georgio Agamben’s notions of liminality and the state of exception to make sense of the violence and care that Mason Evans experienced as a Wild Man.

Chapter five considers the wild life of Lucy Ann/ Joseph Israel Lobdell. Lobdell wrote of her life as a huntress before coming to identify as a man. Lobdell first entered the legal/psychiatric system after being arrested as a Wild Man-like figure living in the woods along the Pennsylvania and New York border. His eventual institutionalization in

New York state's Willard Asylum illustrates the ways that wild and queer came to be pathologized in the late nineteenth century and how the wandering life of the mentally ill came to an end.

The sixth and seventh chapters explore the rise and fall of the Wild Man as a figure in American culture at a national level. The sixth chapter argues that it was the market revolution, the democratization of knowledge and U.S. territorial expansion that resulted in the Wild Man's increased prominence in American culture during the late

1840s and early 1850s. Following the Civil War the role was only solidified by the popularization of evolutionary theories prompted by the publication of Charles Darwin's

8 On the Origin of Species, since the biological sciences in America were infused with a strong strain of Neo-Lamarckian interpretation of evolution. Neo-Lamarckians argued that all species, including humans, underwent changes during their lives as they adapted to their environment, and these adaptations were inheritable. Building on the environmentalism already present in American culture, this view of evolution explained the existence of Wild People such as the Wild Parks family of Monroe, Pennsylvania during the 1870s and 1880s.

The seventh chapter seeks to explain the fracturing of the Wild Man figure in the twentieth century. By the first decade of the twentieth century, evolutionary thought increasingly supported a racialized interpretation of human bodies and human nature.

During these decades the Wild Man figure underwent changes. The positive aspect of the figure, its great physical prowess, was appropriated by those who argued that the white male body was only strengthened by exposure to the natural world. In British Columbia, the figure took a different turn, becoming increasingly associated with that region's native population. In 1929, an Indian agent in the Frazier River Valley coined the term

“Sasquatch” to describe a race of degenerate Indians inspired by the Wild Man figure from regional native cultures. Following the end of the Second World War, international interest in a Wild Man figure from the Himalayas inspired renewed interest in the

Sasquatch of British Columbia. But Nazi Germany had largely discredited the racial science and anthropology that had spawned the idea that Sasquatch was a degenerate

Indian. Instead, those who investigated the creature developed a new theory—that it was an inhuman biped such as a giant ape.

9 American Wild Man stories and encounters make chronology difficult. Many of the most interesting stories about communities that saw Wild Men and individuals who were seen as Wild unfolded over decades. While I have tried to treat these stories in chronological order, they often overlap in time. Every Wild Man story was the product of both local and national influences. I have chosen to move from the specific to the general by presenting the individual Wild Man stories before moving back in time and addressing some of the broader explanations for the rise and decline of the Wild Man figure in

American culture. I end by discussing the Wild Man figure and its transformation into

Sasquatch because it is the form in which the figure continues to exist today.

Wild Men are easy to write about. This is evident from the number of academics, from art history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and history who have turned to them, with their fantastic hairy bodies and wilderness lives, to enliven their studies of western and European culture. But no academic, let alone a historian, has considered the

Wild Man as he existed within American culture. There are, in my mind, three reasons for this omission, reasons that speak to both the methodological problems associated with this project and its rewards.

The first and perhaps most telling is that the Wild Man seems foreign to America, past or present. The Wild Man seems to belong to Alpine festivals, Nepalese folktales, the distant past, or a childish imagination, not downtown Cincinnati, Eastern

Pennsylvania or the pages of the New York Times. In thinking about the American past, we are burdened with its immediacy and the expectation of familiarity. American historians believe we might encounter mentalities which we find different or abhorrent, but not alien. Wild Men inhabit an unfamiliar, even bizarre, America where the

10 established boundaries, those between human and inhuman, internal and external, violence and care, non-cooperation and exclusion, captivity and redemption, are blurred.

To write about Wild Men in America is to bring this unfamiliar world together with the larger and more familiar narratives of American history. Thus, while writing about Wild

Men is easy, writing about Wild Men in America is hard.

The second problem in writing about Wild Men is that they are both completely imaginary and also very real. I do not believe in the physical reality of Wild Men as they were understood by those who saw them. There is no place in my cosmology for the existence of a human being who degenerates into a hairy beast as a result of exposure to the transformative power of nature, nor is there a place for the contemporary version of the Wild Man figure, Bigfoot/Sasquatch. But that does not mean that Wild Men in

America were merely an idea. One of the joys of writing about Wild Men is trying to uncover the mystery of who or what they actually were. When one takes a closer look at the records surrounding Wild Man stories, it is revealed that in many cases Americans inscribed the image of the Wild Man onto actual human beings. Thus an individual who we today would see as mentally ill, homeless, a runaway slave, or a Native American, some Americans saw as a hairy, inhuman Wild Man. Thus Wild Men lived a duel existence: as a figure, and also, once inscribed onto an actual human being, as a reality.

The history of Wild Men thus includes both the stories that Americans told about Wild

Men and also the history of how individuals became entangled, through these stories, with the Wild Man figure.

The final and most basic difficulty of this project is that of source material. I chose to write about Wild Men because I wanted to shed light on an alternative American

11 cosmology and help bring forth the voices of non-elite and non-cosmopolitan Americans into the narratives of American environmental thought. The difficulty is that it is much easier to find the voices of elite and cosmopolitan Americans than those who were not.

Even more difficult is to find Americans discussing something as rare and unusual as a

Wild Man. In some cases I have found firsthand accounts of non-elite Americans’ encounters with Wild Men. However, in many cases I was only able to access these alternative voices through a close reading of more conventional texts, like newspapers, court records, pamphlets, and journals. These documents, even though they were the creation of local elites such as judges, newspaper reporters, and physicians, also reveal the existence of the popular and folk belief in the Wild Man figure. In many cases these local elites shared the popular belief in Wild Men. Yet even the efforts of those local elites who sought to disprove the existence of Wild Men testify to the vibrancy of the figure in American culture.

This project began as an effort to explore how non-elite and non-cosmopolitan

Americans understood the natural world. Much of the narrative of American environmental thought is devoted to the ideas of Romanticists like Henry David Thoreau, outdoorsmen and conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, or environmentalists like

Rachel Carson. This is not to say that these individuals did not shape the narrative in important ways or that they should be forgotten. But most Americans were not romantics, poets, sport hunters, presidents or environmental activists. More importantly, not all

Americans believed or appropriated the positive effects of the natural world. Thus, this project is an attempt to bring forth the voices of Americans who thought very differently about the natural world, wildness and wilderness. I turned to the Wild Man figure as an

12 entry point to an alternative American vision about wilderness, wildness, and human nature. It was the vision of those who felt the power of nature in their everyday lives, who were less certain about civilization’s triumph over wilderness, and who feared the

Wild.

The dominant narrative of wilderness in American culture has been shaped by historian Roderick Nash and his seminal work, Wilderness in the American Mind. Nash argues that the idea of wilderness in America underwent a profound change over the course of the nineteenth century. Nash argues that early Euro-Americans, who lived near to what they called “wilderness,” had an overwhelmingly negative conception of the term, stemming from both their physical insecurity and a long Western tradition that considered the wilderness a diabolic wasteland. Individuals on the frontier, as well as in cities and settled areas, defined progress as the conversion of wilderness into civilization.

This feat not only removed the physical dangers of wildness, but also the danger that the

“opportunity the freedom of wilderness presented for men to behave in savage and bestial manners.” Nash argues that Romanticism made it possible for Americans to see wilderness in a positive light, and American nationalism led to wide acceptance of this new view. By the 1890s, the cultural importance of the wilderness, along with the virtual disappearance of wilderness areas in America, resulted in a national reassessment of the idea. No longer seeing wilderness as a physical or moral threat, Americans came to view it as the creator of the national character and as a solution to the problems that they associated with the progress of civilization.8

8 Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xxi-xxi, 24-29, 45-59, 67, 96, 108, 141-142.

13 Historian William Cronon has also traced the history of the idea of wilderness in order to critique the fallacies and dangers behind contemporary fetishization of wilderness as an a-historic place that is worthy of extraordinary protection and reverence because it is a pristine and utterly natural environment free from any human presence. He argues that we should abandon the human/natural dualism that celebrates wilderness, but he ignores a host of other social and environment problem and injustices. Instead, Cronon suggests, we should embrace the “middle ground,” the blended world of the human and natural agency that exists in all places, that we all actually inhabit. 9

In the last decade, environmental historians have increasingly paid attention to this “the middle ground,” spaces where human and natural agency blend together. One such middle ground has been in the internal environment of the human body. Two recent works on environmental medicine, Courtney Bolton Valencius’ The Health of the

Country and Linda Nash’s Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge, have historicized the ways that Americans understood the relationship between the internal and external environments of the body and landscape.10

This project follows the lead of these embodied histories in that it also is a study of American environmentalism. By environmentalism I do not mean the most popular and current usage of the term, the political and cultural movement devoted to the preservation of the natural environment, but rather its older meaning, the belief that the

9 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69-90.

10 Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

14 external world influenced who and what a person or people became. I hope the Wild Man can take our understanding of this environmentalism beyond environmental medicine to show how environmentalism permeated a unique American struggle to make sense of the most basic questions of human nature and human society.

It is necessary to remember that “wild” describes an object’s relationship not with the non-human world, but with human society. To be wild is to be excluded from or outside the social order, but not indifferent to or unaffected by it.11 Neither an animal that is never seen by human society nor a human being who lives a life without human contact is wild. Wildness originates the moment a community encounters that which is beyond and outside its control. Thus, while this study began as a work of environmental history, it has become much more: a cultural history of wildness, human nature and society in

America. In doing so, it touches on subjects and ideas—the history of mental illness, doctrines of governmentality, and theories about sovereignty and power—that are not often found in works of environmental history.

11 For more on this idea see Georgrio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), which is discussed in the fourth chapter. 15

CHAPTER ONE: “The Wild People of the Navidad.”

The first sign of the creature was the tracks among the cane of the Navidad River bottoms. For a time, the creature was content to take sweet potatoes and green corn from the fields. Later, families would return home and find that half of their victuals, like butter or bread, had been taken. More valuable objects also vanished, including tools, clothing, a fishing net and even a bible. On occasion, farmers would find one of their fat hogs stolen and later returned as a feral hog, lean and long nosed as if it had come straight from the woods. The guard dogs never made a sound and the only clue to what had happened were the footprints leading back to the bottoms. The slaves attributed the disappearances to “The Thing That Comes,” a supernatural entity capable of bewitching both dogs and hogs. The planters and farmers did not credit anything as fantastic as a ghost. Instead, they were confident that a Wild Person was responsible for the strange events.

The settlers tried to catch the creature by lying in ambush in potato fields and corncribs or leading dogs through the underbrush to pick up a scent. One night, settlers almost caught the creature. Using packs of hounds and riders armed with lassos, the hunters drove the creature onto the prairie. In the moonlight, the pursuers saw a woman, naked but covered in short brown fur. She gave a mournful cry and ran towards the river as swiftly as a deer, her long hair flowing behind her. One of the riders gave chase.

16 Drawing close to the Wild Woman, he threw his lasso in hopes of roping her. But at that moment his horse shied away from the strange creature and the lasso fell short. A heartbeat later, the Wild Woman of the Navidad reached the safety of the trees and vanished from sight.

Over the next few years, the settlers would occasionally find traces of the Wild

Woman, including footprints, artifacts, and once her nest or camp, but she was never spotted again. Once, hunters’ dogs picked up the scent of a strange being in the woods.

Hoping for another opportunity to capture the creature, the men set off in pursuit. After a long chase, the hunter treed their prey. It was not the Wild Woman, however, but a

African man or, in the opinion of some, an African. With violence and threats, the hunters forced the African out of the tree and into slavery. When no one came to claim the slave, slavers from the neighboring county bought him or her. The settler community engaged in a heated debate about the “Wild African” or, as they later called him, “Old Jimbo.”

Some of the settlers argued that “Old Jimbo” must have been the real Wild Person all along; others held that she was still out there or had died during an ice storm the previous winter. While they never reached agreement about the Wild Person’s identity, nor was the creature ever seen again, the stories about the Wild People of the Navidad remain a part of Texas lore and tradition to this day.

In 1830, a group of relatives, friends and those they enslaved left Alabama to settle on the western border of empresario Stephen F. Austin's colony in Mexican Texas.

They formed a community first known as the “Alabama settlement” along the banks of

17 the Navidad and Lavaca Rivers in what is today Jackson County, Texas.1 While there

were several Texas empresarios empowered by the Mexican government to attract

colonists and distribute land to them, Austin was the most successful and his colony

contained the main centers of Anglo-Texan settlement along the Brazos and Trinity

Rivers. Across the Lavaca River lay territory of the Mexican-born empresario Martin De

Leon, the town of Guadalupe Victoria and the beginning of the portion of Texas largely

populated by Mexicans.

Inhabiting a unfamiliar environment, located on the edge of Anglo Texas in a

region inhabited by numerous Native Americans, the Anglo-Texans of the Alabama

settlement inhabited what settler Thomas S. McFarland described as a “wilderness.”2

From drought and sickness to Indians and wild animals, the newcomers lived in direct

contact with things and beings outside the community’s control. By cutting new fields out

of the thickly vegetated riverbanks known as “bottoms,” destroying predatory animals,

attacking Indians and keeping their slaves in bondage, they attempted to impose an order

upon the landscape that would allow them to replicate American agrarian strategies in

this new frontier. In doing so, they were like many other frontier communities. Yet this

group of settlers was different in that they told and shared a set of narratives about a Wild

1 Anne H. Sutherland, The Robertsons, the Sutherlands, and the Making of Texas (College Station, Texas: A & M University Press, 2006), 56-66. Ira Thomas Taylor, The Cavalcade of Jackson County (San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1938), 36-37, 62. Samuel C. A. Rogers, Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers: (experiences in Texas, 1830-36), Item ID:30005525, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo (hereafter DRTLA). John S. Menefee, Early Jackson County History (From the Files of the Jackson County Clarion), Item ID:3008202206, DRTLA. Martha Doty Freeman, “The Sutherland Plantation and the Alabama Settlement: a Study in Cluster Migration,” in The Antebellum Period in the Stephen F. Austin Colony: Historical and Archeological Research in the Palmetto Bend Reservoir Area, Jackson County, Texas (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1980). Today much of the area along the historic banks of the Navidad, including the county seat of Texana, is under an artificial lake.

2 Thomas S. McFarland, A Journal Coincidences and Act of Thomas S. McFarland, January 1 1837 to May 24 1840, May 4, 1838, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter CAH).

18 Person or People inhabiting the undomesticated lands around their community, particularly the “bottoms” of the Navidad River.3

In creating narratives about the Wild People of the Navidad, the settlers took a limited pool of physical evidence, such as footprints, and interpreted them according to their understanding of race, gender, environment and the human body as well as their anxieties and hopes regarding frontier settlement and development. At the heart of these anxieties was conflict with Native Americans, the disruption of the settlement by the

Mexican Army during the Texas Revolution, and the difficulties in establishing and maintaining a slave plantation economy. Their narratives about Wild People were reflections of their experience of life on the edge of Anglo settlement in Mexican Texas, mediated by the interpretive framework through which they understood the world.

During the period between 1838 and 1851 in which the settlers believed the Wild

People inhabited the Navidad bottoms, they developed two theories to explain the origins and meaning of the Wild People. These two theories depended upon different interpretations of the Wild Peoples’ racial and gender identity. The most common theory was that the Wild Person was a white woman who had been become separated from the

Anglo-Texan community during the Mexican government's attempt to put down the

Texas Revolution in early 1836. Exposed to the transformative power of nature, the white woman degenerated into an inhuman creature. For the settlers of Jackson County, borders and frontiers were not just external. The human body and human nature could cross between wild and domesticated, human and inhuman. The figure of the Wild Woman

3 There was no agreement as to the number or gender of the Wild People. The Jackson County community and regional newspapers variously referred to this being or beings as the “Wild People,” “Wild Person,” “Wild Man,” and “Wild Woman.” I have followed the sources’ immediate usages.

19 embodied the Alabama settlement's own vulnerabilities and the possibility that the

Anglo-American settlement might fail on the Texas frontier. As they attempted to avoid this fate, the community became fixated on the Wild Woman, blaming her for all kinds of minor misfortunes. They attempted to hunt her down, capture her, and bring her back into the fold of the white community, believing that in redeeming her from her life in the wilderness they might prove themselves invulnerable to her fate.

This narrative changed, however, in 1851, when settlers captured a person of

African descent in the Navidad bottoms. Positing that this African must have escaped from captivity during the revolution and was the true Wild Person, the settlers argued that slavery was a benign institution necessary for the domestication of naturally wild

Africans. Through this new narrative of the Wild African, the settlers reimagined an individual seeking freedom into a creature in need of bondage. Thus these Wild People narratives not only allowed the Anglo-Texans of Jackson County to work out the trauma of their frontier lives, but the narratives also framed the violence they enacted upon others they encountered. These stories not only served to facilitate enslavement but to erase the presence of Native Americans from the Navidad bottoms.

“We found blood, and hunted around through the bottom”

On the Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas, the Navidad River flows south-south-east for seventy-four miles before joining the Lavaca River on its journey into Matagorda Bay.

Today the lower Navidad is barred by the Palmetto Bend Dam a few miles from its intersection with the Lavaca to form Lake Texana. The lake covers much of the historic

Navidad bottoms of Jackson County, including the one-time county seat of Texana.

20 Today, Jackson County is a quiet agricultural community with irrigated rice fields and some cotton, corn and pasture land, dotted with oil wells and natural gas pipelines.

In the nineteenth century, the shoreline was covered in salt marshes and short- grass coastal prairies interspersed with small groves, or motts, of live oak trees. This coastal prairie, broken only by small patches of oak, continued inland on the level, black earth uplands between streambeds. The riparian flood plains, or bottoms as they were commonly known, were upstream from the marsh and covered in dense arboreal vegetation of hackberry, elm, pecan, huisache, and acacia, under which small live oaks and mesquite grew. Mustang grapes hung thickly on the trees, and short and medium grasses, shrubs and cane provided ground cover.4 This patchwork of thick forests, marshes, river, prairie and bays made the Lavaca-Navidad watershed a region of remarkable ecological diversity.

One of the earliest descriptions of the region comes from Henri Joutel, a member of Nicolas De La Salle’s ill-fated Mississippi River expedition of 1684. Having somehow missed the Mississippi, La Salle established a fort in Matagorda Bay, most likely near the mouth of the Lavaca or a nearby creek. La Salle named the river La Riviere aux Balufs after a large herd of wild cattle or more likely bison that roamed the region. The herd thrived on the wildflowers and wild onions of the coastal prairies. Joutel also describes an

“infinite number” of goats, rabbits, turkeys, buzzards, geese, swans, plovers, teal, partridges and many other sorts of fowl fit to eat. In the lagoons, men speared flat fish, red fish trout, eels and other fish he could not identify. He noted that land and sea

4 Robert A. Ricklis, Karankawa Indians of Texas: An Ecological Study of Cultural Tradition and Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 14 – 20. Verne Hurser, Rivers of Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000), 186-200.

21 tortoises “served to season our sauces,” but the settlers used other reptiles like rattle snakes, vipers, and asps to feed their swine.5

While some colonizing Eurasian organisms in Texas such as cattle, goats, swine and diseases like malaria and yellow fever flourished on the Texas coast, the French were not so fortunate. Men died from accidents, snakebites and attack by the Karankawa

Indians. The seed and grain that La Salle’s men planted was lost to drought or eaten by animals. The colony suffered from malnutrition which, coupled with the hard labor that

La Salle demanded, resulted in the death of many men. The colony slowly dwindled for four years until it vanished from starvation, disease and perhaps conflict with the

Karankawa Indians. Between the failure of La Salle's colony and the founding of Stephen

F. Austin’s colony in the 1820s, European settlement in the region was mostly limited to a small number of Spanish missions and colonies established in response to French interest in the region.6

In 1821, the newly independent nation of Mexico decided to follow through on

Spain's plan to settle the sparsely inhabited region of Texas by allowing Austin and other empressarios to organize colonies between the Galveston and Guadalupe Rivers.

Between 1821 and 1835, drawn by cheap land at generous terms and a belief that Texas would eventually become part of the United States, Anglo-American settlers created a largely American region concentrated along the Brazos and Colorado Rivers in the

Austin colony. The region that would later become Jackson County thus comprised the

5 Henri Joutel, Joutel's Journal of La Salle's Last Voyage (London: Lintot, 1714), quoted in Taylor, 182-29.

6 Kelly F. Himmel, The Conquest of the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, 1821-1859 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999), 14-22.

22 western edge of the largest Anglo-American colony in Texas. Six families from the original “Old Three Hundred” in Austin’s grant received large tracks of land in Jackson

County in the 1820s, but wide-scale Anglo-American occupation of the region did not begin until the Alabama settlement in 1830, led by General Jesse White, Major George

Sutherland and Colonel Anthony Winston. Traveling by land and water from Alabama and enduring much difficulty along the way, they settled along the banks of the Navidad and Lavaca Rivers in 1830 and 1831.7

When the Americans began to settle in the region, this patchwork of thick forests, marshes, river, prairie and bays was utilized by several different Native American groups.

Lipan, Apache, and Comanche would visit the area from the northern plains. Bands of

Tonkawa made use of the coastal plains that bordered the upper portions of the river, while the Karankawa dwelt along the coast.8 The Karankawa depended on aquatic foods to a much greater degree than the other groups and used canoes to hunt and fish in the rivers, marshes and lagoons. Red Bluff, which lay on the eastern banks of the Navidad across from Texana, was once an important campground for the Karankawa, while a few miles east lay a small bay that is known to this day as Carncahua Bay.9 The Spanish and then Mexican governments' efforts to control and incorporate these Native Americans through a combination of violence, alliances and missions had met with only limited

7 Taylor, 36-37.

8 Ibid., 46, 133-134.

9 Ibid, 133-134.

23 success. In 1824, Austin attacked the Karankawa and forced them to agree to remain west of the Lavaca River.10

In the summer of 1832, the Alabama settlement organized a vigilante army to attack local Indians in retaliation for the loss of livestock and farm implements. The vigilantes gathered at Texana and split into two groups. One group, under the direction of

John Menefee, traveled up the east side of the Navidad River, while Edward Beaty led a band that traversed the west bank. Over two or three days the two bands traveled upriver until they reached the heart of the bottoms, where Sandy Creek joins the Navidad.11 A short distance up Sandy Creek, Menefee’s band saw the Indian camp. Recalling that day,

Menefee wrote,

We all then marched very silently and as close together as we could in a single file until the foremost got near the camp. S.C.A. Rogers fired first and immediately three or four of those ahead fired, and then others rushed up and fired, but the Indians broke precipitously into the brush, some crossing the creek, and in a few minutes all were out of sight. We found blood, and hunted around through the bottom, but found no dead Indians-afterwards two or three skeletons were found. The object of the expeditions having been accomplished, we were disbanded and returned to our respective homes.12

Rogers’ son claimed that his father killed the Indian he shot during the ambush, found the body on his farm a few days later, and took the Indian’s skull.13

10 Himmel, xx. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).

11 Taylor, 46-47.

12 Menefee, 14

13 Taylor, 47.

24 A few days later, the Anglo-Texans attempted to ambush the survivors of the attack as they fled the area. Menefee described how the vigilantes took up stations on either side of the Navidad River in order to attack the Indians as they traveled downriver.

This second ambush failed and the two bands of vigilantes came dangerously close to shooting at each other during a moment of confusion.14 While Menefee did not mention their ethnicity, the coastal dwelling Karankawa, victims of subsequent settler violence, were the likely targets of this attack.15

For the next several years the settlers waged war against the Karankawa. Because there were groups of Karankawa allied with both the Mexican government and the Texas revolutionaries, they faced suspicion and hostility from both parties.16 In 1835 and 1836, local elites made use of the Anglo-Texan army organized to fight the Mexican government during the Texas Revolution, including Samuel C. A. Rogers, to continue the violence against the Karankawa. According to Rogers,

About this time it was reported that the Caranchua [Karankawa] were killing what little stock the inhabitants in Jackson County had. Major Sutherland prevailed on General Rusk to let him take his company, and return to Jackson County which we did, but did not find any Indians. They had killed a few cattle and hog, had left the county and gone west. We had quite an easy time hunting the Indians.17

14 Menefee, 14.

15 Anne H. Sutherland identifies the victims as Tonkawa, 84. But Menefee says of the Tonkawa, “We were never troubled with them,” 5.

16 Himmel, 77-81.

17 Samuel C. A. Rogers, Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers, 26.

25 While that expedition was not successful in killing any Karankawa, the violence continued into the years of the Republic of Texas. According to Rogers, “From 1836 to

1840 we did very well. We whipped the Caranchua Indians and they gave us no more trouble.”18 By the 1840s, Anglo-Texans had permanently driven them from the Lavaca-

Navidad watershed. In late 1844, the last known band of Kawakawa were massacred near

Guadalupe.19

It was during this period of Indian genocide and Texas independence that the settlers along the Navidad first came to believe that Wild People inhabited the river’s bottoms.20 The Wild People occupied the same environment and engaged in the same subsistence activities as the Indians. In 1832, the bottoms, where the Sandy and Mustang

Creeks flowed into the Navidad, housed Indians; by 1837, the Wild People were thought to live there. The settlers went to war against the Karankawa for stealing farm implements and taking livestock. In the 1840s these same settlers hunted Wild People for stealing plow chains and pigs. Several of the individuals who led the war against the

Karankawa were also some of the principal creators of the Wild People of the Navidad narratives. But they never made a connection between the Wild People and the Native

American groups who had lived there. The few settlers and regional newspaper writers who did mention this possibility did so only to dismiss the idea. Area resident Martin

Kenney raised the idea but rejected it because the Wild Person’s “conduct was foreign to

18 Ibid., 31.

19 Himmel, 77-81.

20 “A Wild Woman,” Victoria Texian Advocate, November 9, 1848, 2. Kenny, 244. Victor M. Rose, Some Historical Fact in Regards to the Settlement of Victoria Texas (Laredo, Texas, 1883), 71-72.

26 the Indian character.”21 The Victoria Texian Advocate, which held that there was a whole

“tribe” or community of Wild People, mentioned Native Americans but only to draw distinction between them and the Wild People.22

The settlers’ reluctance to believe that the bottoms remained inhabited by Native

Americans originated in the difficulties they faced in establishing a prosperous Anglo-

American community on the banks of the Navidad. Stephen F. Austin believed that the removal of Native Americans, whom he called the “universal enemies to man,” was part of the “clearing” of the “roughness” of the environment and the first step towards redeeming the Texas wilderness into a Edenic garden.23 Thus the myth and ideology of the American frontier advanced the idea that Indian genocide was complementary to the progress of agrarian development and expansion.24 To acknowledge a continued Native

American inhabitation of land, combined with their own failure to prosper and their resulting dependence on, rather than control of, the natural world, would have forced the settlers of Jackson County to question the narrative of progress upon which their

21 Martin M. Kenney, “The Wild Woman of the Navidad,” in Legends of Texas, ed. J. Frank Dobie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1924), 244.

22 “The Wild People of Texas,” Victoria Texian Advocate, August 30, 1850, 1. Dilue Harris, “The reminiscences of Mrs. Dilue Harris,” Texas Historical Association Quarterly Vol. IV (October 1900): 107- 108.

23 As quoted in Robin W. Doughty, At Home in Texas: Early views of the Land (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1987), 27-30. Anne. H. Sutherland, XIV. See also Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

24 Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 40, 66. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 51-53. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 122-133.

27 endeavor rested.25 To avoid this unsettling conclusion, the Anglo-Texan community chose to interpret the evidence of a human presence in the area as meaning something other than continued Indian inhabitation of the area.

“Like beasts clothed in hair”

Drawing upon the European Wild Man tradition, American environmentalist thinking that posited the mutability of the human body and human nature in the face of wild nature, understandings of the land as essentially feminine, and other widely shared

American discourses regarding race and gender, these settlers along the Navidad created a set of narratives about Wild People that both reflected and framed experiences of building a Euro-American community in frontier Texas.26 The settlers’ beliefs about Wild

People were a microcosm of their hopes regarding the landscape of Texas. Prior to 1851, most of the settlers in Jackson County, as well as the regional newspapers that covered the story, believed that the Wild Person or People of the Navidad was white and most likely a woman or child. While the settlers would experience difficulties and hardship

25 Slotkin, 33-47.

26 For manifestation of environmentalism in American medicine, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Linda Lorraine Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For human degeneration as a result of the environment, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1973); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr. 1984), 213-240; Dwight Boehem and Edward Schwartz, “Jefferson and the Theory of Degeneracy,” American Quarterly, Vol. No. 4.9 (Winter, 1957), 448-453. Nancy Stepan, “Biological Degeneration, Races and Proper Places,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. Edward Chamberlin and Sanders L. Gilman (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1985), 97-120; Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Feb. 25, 1947): 27-57. For the feminization of the land and nature, see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).

28 from the Wild People, they could be redeemed, like the land itself, from wildness into fecund grace.

Most accounts agreed that the first sign of the creature was its footprints.

According to the Victoria Texian Advocate following the Mexican army's attempt to put down the revolution, during the spring of 1836,

They [the settlers] were compelled to resort to the wild game of the forest for sustenance. On penetrating the deep morasses and timbered bottoms, skirting the lower part of those rivers [the Lavaca and Navidad], they were much surprised to find human footprints mixed up with those of the wild bear, panther, leopard, cat and other animals of the woods.27

The personal recollections of county residents concurred with the Advocate, as both

Kenney and Rogers recalled that the first signs they noticed of the creature were its footprints. However, there was no consensus of exactly how many sets of prints there were. According to Rogers, Martin M. Kenney, and Agnes Ward, the community decided that the smallest set of footprints belonged to a woman, while the maker of the larger tracks had died off.28 The Victoria Texian Advocate went so far as to suggest these tracks

“resemble exactly that of a small delicate female.”29

The settlers and newspapers identified objects taken by and found with the Wild

Person as further evidence of its femininity. The Victoria Texian Advocate wrote that the objects the Wild People took were “such as would be desirable for female or children’s

27 “The Wild People of Texas.”

28 Samuel C. A. Rogers, “Letter to Mr. Russell E. Ward,” in Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers (1810- 1892), Item ID:30005525, DRTLA. Agnes Ward, “Recollections of the Wild Man, As told by Mrs. Agnes Ward to L. E. Ward her Son,” Lilian Ownes Edwards Papers, box 2h438, folder 4, CAH.

29 “A Wild Woman.”

29 use.”30 The settlers saw the objects found among the Wild Person’s possessions, including fine thread, a distaff, and “hair…found wrapped round a finger in the way a woman does,” as evidence that the creature was a woman.31

The settlers also used footprints to declare that the Wild Person was white and not a runaway slave. According to Kenney, the prints could not have belonged to Africans because “the size of the tracks demonstrated that they were not negroes” since Africans’

“feet are all large, flat and ill-shaped.”32 The Victoria Texian Advocate agreed that “it could not be a negro, male or female, because the tracks forbid it.”33 Thus, with very limited physical evidence, both settlers and newspapers agreed that the Wild Person was a white woman or child.34

In a region where Anglo-Americans, Native American, African slaves and

Mexicans composed almost the whole of the population, identifying a Wild Person as white meant the possible inclusion of the creature into the Anglo-American settler community.35 If the Wild Person was once a white member of the community, then all members of the community faced the possibility of sharing its fate, as whiteness was no protection against the transformative effects of a powerful and wild nature.

30 “The Wild People of Texas.”

31 Ward. Kenney, 249.

32 Kenney, 244.

33 “A Wild Woman.”

34 “The Wild People of Texas.”

35 For the distinction between Anglos and Mexicans in nineteenth century Texas, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17-40. Mexicans are remarkably absent from the Wild People narratives. Only one article, “A Wild Woman,” suggested the Wild Person might be a “Mexican Woman.”

30 These narratives invited a direct comparison between the creature’s wild state and the settler community’s own traumatic experience during and just after the Texas

Revolution. The Victoria Texian Advocate believed, “It was quite evident that they [the

Wild People] had once enjoyed the happy influence of civilization.” The paper went on to decry their fate, commenting that, “How very important then that man, being endowed with reasoning faculties, and especially those who once enjoyed the blessing of civilization, should not be suffered to run wild, and roam through the forest with the wild beasts and animals of the woods.”36 The narrative of the Wild People's degeneration into wildness invoked the settlers’ own experience of painfully establishing a settlement in the wilderness only to find it destroyed and themselves removed from the blessing of civilization, as a result of the violence of the Texas Revolution.

“Nothing but wild animals on the prairies and hard time met us at home”

Hardship and struggle marked the first two decades of the Alabama settlement.

Samuel C. A. Rogers remembered it as a period of great suffering:

In the year 1830 in December I emigrated from Decatur Alabama to Texas, landed the 5th day of April 1831 at Cox’s Point. Were I to be governed by my feeling I would here close this narrative and write “Finished,” and take a “Rip Van Winkle” nap and not wake until after the year 1847. But I must not omit anything, though I will often come to places where sorrow was felt and tears shed than where anything joyous or beautiful was seen or enjoyed, but so it was.”37 38

36 “The Wild People of Texas.”

37 Samuel C. A. Rogers, “The Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers at home, Banado, Texas Aug 18, 1891,” Jackson County Vertical file, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, 7.

38 Rogers, Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers, 7.

31 Two factors contributed to the difficulty that these settlers faced: their hard adjustment to the ecology of the Texas coast plains and the disruption of the settlement during the Texas Revolution.

Many, perhaps most, of the colony's residents took sick soon after their arrival.

John S. Menefee described settlers who were ill with fever and chills, most likely malaria, as they acclimated to the region.39 Rogers recalled, “A few days after we arrived there Miss Lydia White, daughter of Benjamin White, sickened, and in a few days after she died…in the course of that summer [1831] every one of the emigrants were sick and some ten or twelve of them died.”40 Among the dead were Rogers’ first wife and son.41

This period of sickness during the first years of settlement was understood by

American settlers as seasoning, the eventual process of acclimating to a new climate.

This interpretation of sickness reflected the belief that there was a close relationship between the human body and the environment. Sickness, fever and chills were the ways in which the environment marked the individual and the price the individual had to pay for inhabiting a new environment.42

The sickness was likely exacerbated by the settlers’ failure to fully understand their near-coastal landscape, which limited their agricultural production. Early settler

Francis M. White recalled,

I was thoroughly of the opinion that the black prairie lands which surrounded my premises was so utterly useless …that I went into the

39 Menefee, 6.

40 Rogers, Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers, 9.

41 Ibid., 10-11.

42 Valencius, 22-28.

32 bottoms and cleared and fenced a few acres which I planted in corn.… It was not until after the Confederate War that the productive qualities of the prairie land were ascertained and rightly appreciated.43

Settler John S. Menefee did the same, writing, “Our crops of 1831 were very short, we were told that prairie land the first year would not make corn, so each cleared some land in the timber for corn.”44 While the bottomland soils were rich, their thick growth limited the number of acres that could be cleared and planted. Moreover, by clustering around the rivers and working in the bottomland, the settlers increased their exposure to mosquito- born disease.

Because of the difficulty that the colonists had in adapting to and transforming their new environment, they faced periods when they came to depend upon the region’s natural resources for subsistence. The dense growth of the bottoms afforded the settlers an abundance of nuts, berries, grapes and other fruit. Early settler A. M. White recalled,

“At times when supplies were not to be had, game, fish, and oysters with which the country had in abundance furnish the chief source of food. For weeks at a time, jerked venison for bread, and fresh venison for meat constituted the daily menu.”45 Others hauled in corn from across the Colorado River.46 On one hand, the abundance of the natural world allowed the colony to survive where it might otherwise have failed, particularly after the poor crop of 1831. However, this dependence upon the region’s wild ecology indicated that the settlement failed to replicate the type of civilized subsistence

43 Francis M. White, Diary, as quoted in Taylor, The Cavalcade of Jackson County, 53.

44 Menefee, 8.

45 White, quoted in Taylor, The Cavalcade of Jackson County, 54.

46 Menefee, 8.

33 pattern that the settlers had enjoyed in prior communities. Eventually, the settlers, particularly the wealthier families, were able to engage in slave-based cotton and sugar production.47 This prosperity, however, did not survive the Texas Revolution.

All of the American settlers in Jackson County felt the impact of the Texas

Revolution, but several were also key participants. A hotbed of revolutionary activity, the

County was the location of the Lavaca-Navidad Meeting in July of 1835 at which the settlers discussed their dissatisfaction with the Mexican government’s use of the military in Texas and produced a resolution that anticipated the Texas Declaration of

Independence. Rogers was the meeting’s secretary and passed the resolution on to a

Major McNutt for dissemination. While McNutt destroyed the resolution when he was captured by Mexican soldiers, and thus the meeting had little impact outside of the county, area residents continued to participate in the conflict.48 After the revolution began in October of 1835, many of the settlers served in the Texan Army. Rogers was part of the siege of San Antonio but left before the Alamo was attacked. William Sutherland, son of leading settler George Sutherland, was not so fortunate.49

The suffering also extended beyond the battlefield and past the war. When in the winter and spring of 1836 a newly arrived Mexican army moved into Texas to put down the revolution, the Alabama settlement stood between it and the center of the Anglo-

Texas settlement further east. In response, the Anglo-Texan settlers fled east, hoping to find safety behind the revolutionary army’s lines. The Anglo-Texans referred to this

47 Anne H. Sutherland, 74-76, and 81.

48 Taylor, 75.

49 Ibid., 62.

34 flight as the “Runaway Scrape” and it was one of the most traumatic events in the lives of those who participated.

Many Anglo-Texans west of the colonies began to leave their homes beginning in

January of 1836 as the Mexican army gathered. However, the Runaway Scrape did not start in earnest until Sam Houston burned down the town of Gonzales and ordered a retreat to the Colorado River after hearing of the Alamo’s fall in March. Messengers spread news of Houston’s ordered evacuation and almost the entire Anglo-Texan population moved towards safety, beyond the Colorado and eventually to the Sabine

River.

Many of those fleeing were unable to bring sufficient supplies. Jeff Parsons, who was a slave of George Sutherland at the time, recalled the Runaway Scrape years later, saying,

There were a lot of scared folks in the ‘runaway’ crowd. Some went on sleds, some on contrivances made with truck wheels, some on wagons, some on horseback, some on foot, or any way they could get there. … The children were crying, the woman praying and the men cursing. I tell you it was a serious time.50

Rogers had a similar impression and commented that he would “never forget the privation and actual suffering that my family and myself had to endure. We had but little to eat and it rained nearly all the time.”51 It was not until the defeat of the Mexican army on April 21 at San Jacinto that the settlers were able to return home.

While the immediate danger had passed, the deprivation continued for the settlers even after they returned home. During the war, General Urrea and the Mexican cavalry

50 Jeff Parsons, quoted in Taylor, 80.

51 Rogers, Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers, 17.

35 ravaged gulf coast settlements, feeding off of livestock and crops, and burning everything else.52 When the residents of Jackson County returned to their farms, they found that much of what they had achieved over the proceeding five years had been destroyed.

Mrs. George Sutherland arrived home to the devastation in June of 1836. While the family slaves such as Jeff Parsons had buried the Sutherlands’ valuables, including washtubs, pots, kettles and even an old secretary desk, there was little else that remained.

In a letter to her sister, Sutherland wondered, “God only know how we will make out,” since the family had “nothing in the world worth speaking of, not one mouthful of anything to eat, but the little we brought home with us.” Even the family’s buildings were lost to the war.53 Parsons shared Mrs. Sutherland’s grim assessment of the situation, recalling that,

Nothing but wild animals on the prairies and hard times met us at home. We had to live three months on game and without a taste of bread. We built scaffolds for drying the meat. We ate it dried, fried, boiled, broiled, stewed, baked and roasted, but we had to live on it so long we became tired of it, anyway we could cook it.54

The months of living off the land ended for the wealthy family when George Sutherland obtained supplies from a vessel in the bay.55

52 Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148-149.

53 Mrs. George (Frances) Sutherland, “Letter to sister, June 5, 1836,” in George Sutherland Papers, box 2k328, CAM.

54 Jeff Parsons, quoted in Taylor, 83.

55 Martha Doty Freeman and William B. Fawcett, The Antebellum Period in the Stephen F. Austin Colony: Historical and Archeological Research in the Palmetto Bend Reservoir Area, Jackson County, Texas, Palmetto Bend Reservoir series, v. 3 (Austin: The University of Texas, Texas Archeological Survey, 1980), 35, 39-40.

36 Rogers’ experience following the defeat of the Mexican army was even worse. Rogers returned home “but found nothing as the Mexicans had carried off everything. Of about a hundred head of cattle, they had taken all but one.”56

Remembering that event, Rogers said, “Well if there ever was a time that caused me to almost wish that I had never been born, it was then.”57 Rogers briefly rejoined the Texan army but returned to find his family in a dire situation.

Lacking any sort of grain, Rogers hunted deer with an ineffectual old musket. He recalled,

Can you imagine a worse condition? Scarcely anything to eat, only venison and often too ill to obtain that, no medicine, with nothing to nourish the sick, not a cup of coffee or a spoonful of sugar. How often did I think I was a God forsaken creature and how long did I travel under the shadow of a dark sorrow?

Desperate for food, Rogers traded the hundred and twenty acres of land he was awarded for military service for half a barrel of half-spoiled flour. The Rogers family was not free of hunger until Samuel was able to obtain supplies from a shipment of goods donated from New Orleans.58

While the residents of Jackson County did not experience another event as disruptive as the Texas Revolution and the Runaway Scrape, they were not free from fear or want over the next decade. In 1837, Thomas S. McFarland worried about raids from both Indians and Mexicans.59 1842 saw unpredictable weather and the threat of a new

56 Rogers, Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers, 18.

57 Ibid., 19.

58 Ibid., 29-30.

59 McFarland, February 11, 1837.

37 attack by Mexico.60 In 1848, three years after the annexation of Texas by the United

States, George Sutherland saw both his mother and several of his slaves take sick. That same year, with 35 acres planted in cotton, he was unable to produce one bale.61 Even bears were a nuisance and broke into corncribs.62 Although some families like the

Sutherlands and the Menefees prospered as merchants, planters and ranchers, the settlers were still vulnerable to the power of both peoples and an environment outside of their control.63

“The d--n wild people”

In creating the Wild People narratives, the Anglo-Texans reflected upon their experience of deprivation by stating that Wild People were a product of the revolution's disruption of society. An 1850 article from the Houston Texas Telegram speculated that:

It is not improbable that during the war of the revolution, when the people of that section were driven from their homes by the victorious army of Urrea, some children might have been secreted in the woods or left there, and their relations never returning, have become like beasts clothed in hair and feeding on herbs and small animals as they can capture or pillage from the settlers.64

Many of the residents of Jackson County shared this belief that the Wild People were white children lost during the war. According to Kenney, the community held that:

60 Freeman and Fawcett, 37.

61 George Sutherland, “Letter to Sarah Sutherland, 14th October 1848,” George Sutherland Papers, box 2k328, CAM.

62 Roger, “Letter to Mr. Russell E. Ward.”

63 For more on agriculture in the Alabama settlement, see Freeman and Fawcett, 41-53, and various documents in the John Sutherland Menefee Papers, CAM.

64 “Wild Woman of the Navidad,” Houston Texas Telegraph, January 17, 1850, 4.

38 The most probable conjecture seemed to be that they were lost children who had become separated from their friends during the hurried retreat of the American settlers from the invading army of Mexico in 1836. It was supposed that they had become so alarmed that, believing the whole world hostile, they kept themselves in innocent ignorance secluded from mankind.65

As a result of a separation from civilization, the child suffered transformation into a Wild

Woman, a creature who “wore no clothes, but her body was covered with short brown hair.”66 By identifying the Wild People of the Navidad as lost and feral white children or women, rather than as Native Americans, the settler community sought to reconcile their desire to replicate American society in their new home and their fear that it was impossible to do so in the wild and unstable landscape. The transformation of women and children was particularly meaningful for they were the agents of communal reproduction, overcome by the transformative power of the natural world that came to undermine its survival.

The settlers of Jackson County believed that the Wild People commonly attacked the material basis of the community’s survival and prosperity, blaming the disappearance of all manners of items on the Wild People. According to the Victoria Texian Advocate, the Wild Person “frequently visits the neighboring houses at night, for the purpose of picking up such articles as it can lay its hands on—clothing particularly.”67 Kenney recalled a host of objects stolen by the Wild People, including log chains, tools, books, corn from cribs, and food from the cupboard.68 According to the Victoria Texian

65 Kenney, 244.

66 Ibid., 251.

67 “A Wild Woman.”

68 Kenney, 246-249. 39 Advocate, the settlers of that section believed the Wild People “depredate upon their stock, poultry and corn fields.”69 After the revolution, the community could not afford even the smallest loses.70

Rogers’ personal recollections of the Wild People suggest how even these small pilferings constituted a profound hardship for the struggling community. He was one of the most frequent victims of the Wild People as his house was close to the Navidad bottoms.71 Rogers relates how his household painstakingly made fishing net out of raw cotton and sold a cowhide to buy sinkers. With the net, the household was able to pull an astonishing number of fish out of the nearby Sandy Creek. Soon thereafter, however, the household awoke to find the net cut and one half gone. According to Rogers, his brother

Franklin cursed, “d--n them wild people if we can’t catch or kill them they will break us up.” Rogers, being “sorter religious for a great many years,” managed to express his anger without resorting to profanity.72

A few weeks later the Wild People struck the Rogers household again. A hired man named Hall attempted to plow a bottom field but his trace chain had vanished, causing the normally devote Presbyterian to cry out, “The d--n wild people.” The bottom potato field was the scene of further cursing when Hall discovered that once the potatoes were sufficiently large to eat, the Wild People came and dug them up at night. The same phenomenon occurred again a little later in the cornfield. By stealing essential means of

69 Victorian Texian Advocate, 1850.

70 Doughty, 31. “The Wild People of Texas.”

71 Ward.

72 Rogers, “Letter to Russell E. Ward.”

40 production like nets and plow chains, the Wild People threatened to drive the Rogers household back to the deprivation they had just escaped. 73

Along the Navidad, the Wild People embodied all the daily hardships and mishaps of farm life on the frontier. Rogers admitted in a humorous story that misfortune was sometimes falsely attributed to the Wild People. One day an old Irish man he employed to cut hay came riding out of the field towards him shouting, “Mr. Rogers get your gun the wild man is in the field.” Rogers and his brother headed to the field and saw a bear eating corn. The Irish man then admitted to having fallen asleep in the field when a noise woke him, at which point he saw a black creature standing up and assumed it was the Wild Man.74

The Wild People represented the ways that the wild environment undermined the settlers’ ability to maintain themselves as civilized white people. If agricultural production failed, the settlers would have no choice but to return to hunting and foraging.

Moreover, as degenerate members of the settler community, Wild People stood as graphic reminders of the consequences of the failure to cultivate the landscape and a return to drawing subsistence from the natural world. Thus, they served both as the agents of social collapse and the embodiment of its consequences.

The settlers’ concerns about failed agricultural production and the resulting potential for degeneration is evident in one of the most common stories told about the

Wild Person of the Navidad: that it stole the settlers’ pigs. The Houston Telegraph

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

41 mentions that the creature had stolen several pigs.75 Agnes Ward wrote that at first her family paid no mind to the “little pilferings” from the family storage shed and field. This policy changed, however, when the Wild Person “got to feeding on one of my father’s sows that had a bunch of pigs and every now and then a pig would be missing, …. so my father and Uncle Russell, I suppose, went down into … the woods and found his camp.”76

Kenney and Taylor told a similar story about the Wild Person taking fat hogs and replacing them with lean pigs. An unnamed farmer was fattening a hog in a pen near his house when one night a bear came by and attempted to steal it away. The farmer’s vigilant dogs killed the bear before the hog was harmed. The dogs remained in a heightened state of awareness night after night, protecting the pig. Then, according to

Taylor,

One night a strange phenomenon happened, the 'Wild Man' brought a poor long-snouted hog out of the woods and put it in the pen. He took the fat hog and ran off with it safely; not a sound was made by the dogs....‘The Thing’ continued this mysterious performance at numerous places, carrying away fat hogs through the brush with remarkable ease and speed.77

This story of the Wild Person replacing fat hogs with feral hogs encapsulates the underling fear of degeneration held by the settler community. A fat hog was an indication that the farmer was sufficiently established that he could keep his pig in a pen rather than allowing it to roam free. The transition from a foraging hog to a fat fed hog was evocative of the transition from dependence on wild resources to fully agricultural ones. The

75 “Wild Woman of the Navidad.”

76 Ward.

77 Taylor, 176. Kenney, 248.

42 features of the hog that the Wild Person brought, a lean build and long nose, were characteristic of feral or semi-feral swine. These differences between feral and domestic swine, particularly skull morphology, can develop quite rapidly in populations as a result of natural selection of the feral pigs’ rooting snoot, as well as from nutrient shortage and environmental factors.78 Frontier communities in America commonly let their hogs range free in a semi-feral state, only to be rounded up for slaughter. The free-ranging of hogs was common in Texas throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries.79

It is likely that farms such as those in Jackson County would have been aware of the morphological changes that took place in their livestock within a single generation if they were allowed to enter a semi-feral state. By exchanging the fat hog for the long-nosed hog, the Wild Woman was causing the degeneration of settlers’ livestock in the same harmful ways the natural world might. If the natural world could transform children into

Wild Women and fat hogs into feral pigs, what could the community do to flourish in the new landscape?

“Bring them under a more benign influence”

To survive in the wilds of the Texas frontier, the settler community had to do more than rid the landscape of those things that threatened production and reproduction; it had to incorporate them, including the Wild People, into their agrarian community.

Every narrative about the Wild People of the Navidad expressed a desire for their capture or told of actual attempts to do so. The Victoria Texian Advocate stated that the

78 John J. Mayer and I. Lehr Brisbin, Jr., Wild Pigs in the United States: Their History, Comparative Morphology, and Current Status (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 190, 200.

79 Ibid., 42.

43 community offered a reward of forty cows for anyone who could capture the creature.80

The Houston Telegraph recorded the efforts of a Mr. Glascock to capture the creature with a lasso and a pack of hounds, stating, “He has incurred considerable expense and has exposed himself to great hardships and dangers to secure it.”81 According to Rogers,

Russell Ward proposed that “all the neighbors would collect and hunt the bottoms.”82 The

Victoria Texian Advocate stated, “many plans were laid, and drives with hounds taken and chases on fleet horses to catch some or all of these people—but all in vain.”83

Kenney gives the most detailed account of hunting the Wild Woman. First some young men hid in a potato patch frequented by the Wild Woman until they saw a naked, shadowy form. At that point, “They sprang out to seize her, but though they were active young men, she was more agile still and bounded away as silently and quickly as the flitting of a shadow, and was instantly lost in the darkness.”84 In another case, a young man trapped the creature in a corncrib only to panic and run away.85 Then, according to

Kenney, “a more systematic and cautious plan was adopted. A number of hunters formed extended lines and drove through the woods with leashed hounds, while others, well mounted and provided with lassos, took ‘stands.’” The men rode through the woods until their hounds picked up the Wild Woman’s scent. The young men almost caught her with

80 “A Wild Woman.”

81 “Wild Woman of the Navidad.”

82 Rogers, “Letter to Russell E. Ward.”

83 “The Wild People of Texas.”

84 Kenney, 245.

85 Ibid., 247.

44 the lassos, but she was too fast and their horses were afraid of the strange creature and so she was able to escape into the forest.86 The settlers also used communal hunts and dogs to kill Native Americans and predators and to track down runaway slaves. These were the means the settlers used to create their agrarian society by excluding some beings and forcibly incorporating others. But were these hunts an effort to incorporate or exclude the

Wild Woman? What would the settlers do if they ever captured the Wild People?

Within the Wild People narratives were expressions of sympathy and concern for their fate. Kenney wrote that “compassion of the people arose with their curiosity” in regards to the Wild Woman, and her predation of farmsteads and fields was not a motivation for the community’s efforts to capture her, since “the poor creature was welcome a hundred times to what she took in her little forays, ‘harmless to others but so dangerous to her self.’”87 He describes how “every means was used to communicate with her… and letters plainly written in simple language were posted at her recent camp and other places entreating her to make herself known.” Kenney depicts the settler community as so desperate to save her from “the dark forest where she roamed like some wild animal” that “homes and friends were offered her.”88 This outreach was predicated on an understanding of the creature as female and white and thus a fit subject for pity and re-inclusion into society.

The Victoria Texian Advocate expressed similar sentiments and it, like Kenney, had a gendered understanding of the settlers’ need to rescue the Wild People. According

86 Ibid., 250.

87 Ibid., 247.

88 Ibid., 250.

45 to the paper, the settlers were interested in saving the Wild People because the idea of children “being raised up” in such conditions was “harrowing to every mother and woman in general.” When efforts to capture the Wild People and force them back into civilization failed, the community attempted to woo them back with “acts of kindness, mercy and love.”89 Like Kenney, the Victoria Texian Advocate understood the Wild

People to be lost and vulnerable whites, largely women and children. Concern about the effects of a wilderness environment on the development of the Wild People’s children reflected the settlers’ own concerns about their ability to physically and socially reproduce an Anglo-American agrarian community in Texas. How different were the conditions of the settler community from those of the Wild People that were so harrowing to every mother?

The settler community did not just fear the natural world; it also hoped to flourish in the new lands by triumphing over nature and transforming the Texas wilderness into a productive garden. This hope was evident in the settlers' daily agricultural labor, as well as in their desire to rescue the Wild People. Both are feminine objects whose fertility the community wished to harness for the purposes of both production and reproduction.90

The meaning of the Wild People was encapsulated by the Victoria Texian Advocate, which reported, “The spirits of the settlers began to be greatly revived and sanguine hopes were entertained of redeeming, at no very distant day, this community from a life of nature and wildness, and bring them under a more benign influence.”91 Wild Peoples'

89 “The Wild People of Texas.”

90 Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land.

91 Ibid., 1. 46 state was the result of their “life of nature and wildness.” Removed from that environment to one which had a more “benign influence,” the Wild People could be redeemed into the settlers’ society. Thus, the effort to capture and reincorporate the Wild

People was a contest between the power of two environmental influences: wilderness and civilization.

The use of “redeem” to describe the reincorporation of the Wild People invoked a complex web of concepts embedded in the word: the freeing of a captive, the deliverance from sin, and the transformation of a landscape from a howling wilderness to a garden.

This latter meaning of the term linked the return of the feminine Wild People to the project of transforming the wilderness into a garden. The feminine Wild People were the object of the settlers’ redemptive efforts in the same way that the feminine landscape itself was also the object of the settlers’ redemptive labor.

For Jackson County settlers, redemption from wildness had both a secular meaning—fertility harnessed for the community’s good—and religious meaning—the absolution of sin that stemmed from a life of wildness. The transformation of the agriculturally unproductive into the productive was an act with religious implications in the American Christian tradition.92 If labor and pain stemmed from the fall and the casting out of humans from the Garden of Eden into the howling wilderness, then efforts to restore the garden and redeem the land were also acts of religious redemption. The article also proclaimed a religious meaning to that return by quoting a hymn that

92 Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 3. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 24.

47 paraphrased the parable of the Prodigal Son: “the dead’s alive and the lost is found.”93 By returning to the community, the Wild People could be redeemed from the sin of their wild life and into productive fertility.

The final meaning of redemption was the act of freeing a captive, an act with which the settlers of Jackson County were quite familiar. The Comanche of Texas captured nearly a thousand Mexicans and a small but still significant number of Anglo-

Americans, including in May of 1836 Cynthia Ann Parker, who became fully acculturated into their society.94 The threat of captivity became readily apparent in

August 1840, when the Comanche raided Victoria and then destroyed the settlement of

Linnville, which lay a few miles south of Texana. Rogers was part of the settlers’ counter attack. According to him:

They [the Comanche] killed a great many inhabitants and took two ladies and some Negroes prisoners. One was Mrs. Watts, the wife of Major Watts, the collector at Linnville. They killed the Major at the time they charged the town. We rescued Mrs. Watts at the battle of Plum Creek. The other lady was a Mrs. Crosby of Victoria. The Indians killed her when we charged them at Plum Creek, they also shot Mrs. Watts, but not fatally.95

This raid was a lasting reminder of the possibility of forced acculturation.

Given the popularity of the captivity genre it was likely the settlers were also familiar with captivity narratives. Scholars have noted the important ways in which

93 “The Wild People of Texas.” John Wesley, Franz Hildebrandt, and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, The Works of John Wesley Vol. 7, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 90.

94 Lathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550- 1900 (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993), 2-8.

95 Rogers, The Reminiscences of Samuel C. A. Rogers, 31.

48 gendered and racial images shaped the content and meaning of these narratives.96

Deriounian-Stodola and Levernier argue that “captivity’s main metonymy was the dramatic and decisive fracturing of the family unit” which “symbolized not only the individual household but society at large.” Moreover, the image of the single traumatized and victimized woman was the defining image of captivity as a whole.97

Richard Vanderbeets argues that Indian captivity narratives follow a common pattern of ritual acts from which they derive their integrity and shared meaning as a genre. According to Vanderbeets, captivity narratives follow the “hero’s initiation” archetype of separation from society, transformation while outside of society, and eventual return to society. In the narrative, following an initial ordeal of separation, the captive undergoes a slow process of acculturation towards the Indian way of life, most often presented in terms of an acclimation to Indian food. Following this acclimation, the captive undergoes some sort of adoption ritual into Indian society before eventually returning to white society.98

Wild People narratives as told by the settlers of Jackson County were a type of captivity narrative. Rather than being captured by Indians, the Wild People were captured by nature itself. The first two acts of the captivity narrative, the protagonist’s dislocation or capture by Indians and incorporation or adoption into Indian society, were present in these Wild People narratives. The women or children were separated from their community when they were left behind and lost in the woods during the Runaway

96 Pearce, 1, and16. Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, 8, 14, 23, 26, 32, 112-113, and 118.

97 Derounian-Stodola, 112-113, and 118.

98 Richard Vanderbeets, “The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual,” American Literature Vol. 43, No. 4. (January 1972): 548-562.

49 Scrape. The incorporation into nature, the structural equivalent of adoption into Indian society, was their transformation into beast-like creatures covered in hair. But the Indian captivity narrative contains a third act, redemption, in which the captive is returned to the white community from which he or she was cleaved. The efforts that the settlers made to lay their hands upon the Wild People and take them back into the settler civilization reflected their own understanding of the Wild People’s plight as a type of captivity. They desired and even needed to complete the narrative by redeeming the Wild People from their captors, wilderness. The lost white woman held captive by nature embodied the community that created her and sought to redeem her. Her life of deprivation and hardship was theirs. The dangers that she faced of transformation into something inhuman and uncivilized reflected the community's fear that such a fate might befall them as well.

It is not by chance, then, that the first stories that appeared in print regarding the

Wild Woman, stories that circulated in newspapers across the United States, did so in

1848, following the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the conclusion of the Mexican-

American war in 1848. 99 The story of the child lost in the wilderness was not just the story of the settlers of Jackson County, but also a reflection of the experiences of the entire Anglo-American population of Texas, all waiting for their return to America from their sojourn in the wilderness of Mexico and Independence. Free from the threat of

99 As Robert Walter Johannsen argues in To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), the Mexican-American War was both the first war to be covered by reporters working for national presses and America's first great contact with a foreign nation. The annexation of Texas and the war sparked great interest in the region, helped transform Texans into almost legendary figures and made the frontier a defining American characteristic. 12, 16, 133. 50 captivity from Mexico, Indians or Wild Nature, the Anglo-Texans faced one last task, making sense of themselves as captors.

“Thus Solves the Mystery”

The spring of 1851 saw the capture of the Wild Person. At least, that is what some in Jackson County decided when a group of hunters took an African hiding in the

Navidad bottoms by force. Just as the narratives of the Wild Person as a lost woman drew upon discourses about race, gender, environment and civilization, so too did the very different stories about the Wild Man as an African. In this case, however, the narratives equated slavery’s absence with wildness. Annexed into the United States, secure from

Mexico following the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, protected from Indians by a combination of genocide, removal and federal forts, the settlers of Jackson County faced few external dangers. The only struggle that remained for them was the continued forced incorporation of slaves and their labor into their society.

Slavery was central to Anglo-American settlement in Texas. Stephen F. Austin saw slavery as essential to his colony, proclaiming in 1833 that “Texas must be a slave

Country.”100 To get around questions regarding the legality of slavery in Mexican Texas, men like Thomas Menefee contracted their slaves into indentured servitude before entering Texas.101 In Jackson County, slavery was an increasingly important part of the economy in the antebellum period. In 1847, of the county’s 718 inhabitants, 268 were

100 Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 2, 4, 48-49, and 95.

101 Freeman, 22.

51 African-American slaves.102 The Menefees, Sutherlands, and others leading families’ early attempts at cultivating plantation sugar suggest a settler vision of a county economy based on slave production. While sugar proved unprofitable, cotton did not and the next decade saw a rapid growth in both the white and slave populations. By 1860, the number of slaves had increased to 1,194, and slaves comprised some 45% of the population. The large increase of the slave population allowed for an even larger increase in cotton production, which grew from 290 to 2,270 bales in the decade. The increase in both population and cash crop production meant there was an equally large increase in crop acreage: 3,000 acres in 1850 and eight times that, around 25,000, by 1860.

The enslaved African-Americans may have had their own understanding of what the inhabitant of the Navidad Bottoms might be. From what limited sources there are, it appears that the slave community understood this creature to be a supernatural entity:

“the thing that comes” or “IT.” Unfortunately, their reading of the creature is almost invisible in the documentary record, only appearing when referenced by white settlers and planters. Rogers wrote that the slaves referred to the creature as “It.” Kenney recorded that a “Negro Teamster” blamed the disappearance of a log chain on “Dat thing that comes” and that the slave community believed the creature which they called “That

Thing” could bewitch dogs and hogs.103 Because there is a scarcity of sources that discuss the slave community’s beliefs about the creature, however, let alone any sources from their perspective, it is impossible to know what stories they told about it and how it reflected their experience with the landscape of the Texas frontier.

102 “State Census for 1847,” Houston Telegraph, May 11, 1848, 2.

103 Kenney, 246.

52 During the Revolution, some slaves saw an opportunity for freedom and fled west towards the approaching Mexican army, while those who held them in bondage fled east.104 But other slaves engaged in even more dramatic resistance, as Jackson County resident B. J. White informed Stephen F. Austin:

The negroes on Brazos made an attempt to rise. Majr Sutherland came on here for a few men to take back, he told me—John Davis returned from Brazoria bringing the news that near 100 had been taken up and many whipd nearly to death some hung etc R.H. Williams has nearly Kild one of his.105

According to White's post-script, the slaves sought a complete transformation of the social order, for they “intended to ship the cotton to New Orleans and make the white men serve them in turn.” Like Indians inhabiting settled lands, or white women running wild, African freedom was an inversion of the established order of the settlers’ agrarian society. While it is unclear if slaves in Jackson County also revolted, George Sutherland and other Jackson County men brutally suppressed the uprising.

In a community dependent upon the maintenance of the slave system, the identification of the Wild Man as African had a very different meaning compared to the identification of the Wild Woman as a white child or woman. The narratives that surrounded the Wild Man as African focused not on the transformative power of nature but on the natural wildness of the African. For these narratives, the Wild African’s life in the Navidad bottoms was not a break from the proper order of things but simply the fate of an African absent the benevolent influence of white civilization via enslavement.

104 Sean Kelley, “'Mexico in His Head’: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860,” Journal of Social History Vol. 37 Issue 3 (Spring 2004): 709-724.

105 B. J. White to Stephen F. Austin, October 17, 1835, The Austin Papers, vol. 3 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1928), 190.

53 These narratives about the Wild Man as an escaped slave took pains to argue he

was not an African-American but rather a native of Africa. The short newspaper account

from the Houston Telegraph described the individual as an “African Negress” who

“cannot speak English but can converse freely with the Africans in the neighboring

plantation.”106 Harris stated in her reminiscence that he was a “Wild African, one of those

that Ben Fort Smith brought to Texas in 1834 from Cuba.” According to Harris, the

African escaped bondage and, after unsuccessfully trying to break into her house, “made

his way to the Navidad bottom. He was often seen by travelers and was called the Wild

Man of the Navidad.”107

The more local sources agree with Harris that the Wild Man was a native of

Africa who escaped during transport. Victor M. Rose, who produced an 1883 history of

neighboring Victoria County, wrote, “The wild woman of the Navidad proved to be a

man of some fifty years of age, a wild savage African black as ebony, who grinned

horribly and seemed to be ejaculating in some gibberish, unknown to the tongues of

men.” According to Rose,

He could give no account of himself, whatsoever, and the general supposition is that he was one of a cargo of slaves brought from Africa to Texas by the notorious Monroe Edwards, who was lost in the Texas Woods while too young to remember the history of his captivity. May we suggest that he might have been one of the lot of Africans that escaped from the Bowie brothers.108

106 “The Wild Woman Caught,” Houston Telegraph as quoted by The Gettysburg Adams and Sentinel and General Advertiser, March 17, 1851, 7.

107 Dilue Harris, 107-108.

108 Rose, 71-72.

54 Kenney and Taylor tell a similar story of his African origins. According to both authors, a sailor was able to speak to the man and hear his story. The African related that he was sold by his parents to slave traders in West Africa for a knife and tobacco. He was then transported to Texas by ship, after which he traveled up a long river, probably the

Brazos, and was placed in a large house and fed sugar cane. He and another man from his tribe escaped, wandering across prairie and woods, crossing so many rivers that he lost count. Eventually they came to the thick, jungle-like bottoms of the Navidad, where they settled. His companion died and he had lived alone ever since. After his capture he was advertised as a “stray negro” and auctioned off to a P.T. Bickford of Refugio County for

$207.00.109

The African Wild Man narratives demonstrate how the settlers’ understanding of wildness was racially contingent. Like the white Wild Woman narratives, these narratives related the Wild African to the social disruption of the Texas Revolution. The Houston

Telegraph stated that the African fled to the wilderness when the settlements were abandoned.110 The local accounts all suggested that slave traders took advantage of the chaos of the revolution or the period just prior to it to illegally transport slaves from

Africa. Yet none of the narratives of the African Wild Man used the discourse of redemption so prominent in those of the white Wild Woman narratives. None of the authors saw him as lost to the wilderness and subject to environmental transformation.

Rather, emphasis the narratives placed on his African origins suggest they viewed

109 Kenney, 252-253. Taylor, 179-181. “The Wild Man of the Navidad,” Victoria Texian Advocate, August 7, 1851, 2.

110 “The Wild Woman Caught.”

55 wildness as an essential trait of an African outside of slavery. The African Wild Man dwelt in a wild environment like the Navidad bottoms because “the cane breaks and timber were similar to their native Africa and was to their liking.”111 He never could degenerate into a threat to the community because, according to Harris, he already was one from the moment of his escape. The Rose narrative depicts him as an almost animal- like creature who speaks gibberish and is unaware of his own history. The African Wild

Man was thus not a captive of nature; rather, his wildness stemmed from a lack of the institution meant to control his inherent wildness: slavery.

Once returned to slavery, the Wild Man was of no further interest or threat.

Kenney ends his discussion of the African Wild Man by writing, “The purchaser turned him loose among his other negroes, and owing to the nature of his race, he remained contented in his new Home.”112 Taylor similarly writes that once he was treated as a slave, the African Wild Man “soon degenerated into ‘Old Jimbo’ and lost his identity as

‘The Wild Man of the Navidad.’”113 The African was wild in his normal environment of the wilderness, but once enslaved and tamed, he became indistinguishable from the other slaves. As the Houston Telegraph concluded, “Thus Solves the Mystery that has hitherto given a romantic interest to the Story.”114

Yet the African was not content to remain a slave. Soon after he was purchased by

Bickford, he escaped again to the uncontrolled landscape of the Texas forest, a place that

111 Taylor, 180.

112 Kenney, 253.

113 Taylor, 181.

114 “The Wild Woman Caught.”

56 Anglo-Texans saw as wilderness but the African saw as freedom.115 Unfortunately, the settlers quickly captured him again, placing him in bondage for the rest of his days.

After “Old Jimbo”

The Wild People narratives were a type of frontier myth, not a paean to the inevitability and righteous necessity of conquest but an anxious meditation on the possibilities of failure and its consequences. While Jackson County residents did transform what they saw as a wilderness into a productive commercial agrarian community, their success was not always certain. The civilization they were building was vulnerable and any disruption of it might expose them to the power of the natural world.

In the most extreme manifestation of the nineteenth century belief in the connection between the body and the natural world, these settlers posited that the environment could penetrate their bodies and transform them from human beings into hairy beasts. The power that could penetrate their bodies could also transform them into something less than human. Thus a person could only be truly human if he or she inhabited an environment that allowed that existence. These narratives about Wild People offer a window into the often unspoken assumptions about the relationship between human nature and wild nature and the construction of “humanness” in Antebellum America.

In the figure of the Wild People, the settlers of Jackson County brought together a concept describing uncontrolled physical spaces, or wilderness, with uncontrolled human behavior, or wildness. Only by transforming a wild ecology into an agrarian one, domesticating women and Africans, and excluding people like Native Americans could a prosperous agrarian community take root along the banks of the Navidad.

115 “The Wild Man of the Navidad.” 57 When imagined as whites lost from the community during the war, the Wild

People of the Navidad were perfect liminal beings. Their race and gender demanded that they be part of the community, but their transformation into hairy creatures meant that they lay outside the border of both humanity and the community of Anglo-Texans. Living in the “bottoms” of the Navidad River, they inhabited a liminal space, a kind of proximate wilderness which, while situated literally in the backyard of the cultivated and civilized spaces of the settlers’ homes and fields, was not a location they could fully control. The Wild People of the Navidad embodied the liminal status of the Alabama settlement as a whole. For like the creatures they imagined, the Alabama settlement lay on a border between civilization and wilderness, prosperity and ruin, Mexico and

America, Indian and white.

However, discourses of humanness and wildness were not independent of

American discourse of race or gender. When the settlers expressed their desire to redeem the Wild People they did so because they saw them as white and feminine and thus suitable subjects for redemption. Likewise, the settlers dismissed the possibility that the

Wild People might be in fact Native American, as that could undermine their narrative of their successful conquest of wilderness. When, free of their fears of Mexico, Indians or wilderness, the settlers captured an African in the bottoms, they rewrote the narratives of the Wild People. Instead of liminal beings who embodied the settlers’ own precarious position between civilization and wilderness, the Wild African become an argument for the natural wildness of all Africans and the necessity of their enslavement.

58

CHAPTER TWO: The Genealogy the American Wild Man.

It was the particular and local experiences of the Anglo-Texan settlers of Jackson

County that resulted in their belief that the bottoms of the Navidad River were inhabited by Wild People. But the belief in Wild Men was not unique to that community, nor was that community responsible for the creature of the figure. When the Anglo-Texans of

Jackson County created the legend of the Wild People of the Navidad, they did so by drawing on a long and rich tradition of Wild Man stories and lore. To understand where the nineteenth-century American belief in Wild Men originated, we must trace the genealogy of the figure back in time and across cultures. Many cultures throughout the world possessed a Wild Man figure, a liminal creature that existed between human and animal in the spaces outside human settlement. People from Indonesia, Sri Lanka,

Mongolia, and China told Wild Man stories. But of most interest for understanding the figure in nineteenth century America were the Wild Man traditions of Native American,

African American, and European cultures.

A Wild Man-like figure was present in the cultures of various Native American ethnic groups, from the southeastern portions of the United States to the Pacific

Northwest.1 While it is possible that various Wild Man figures from Native American

1 Phillip Stevens, “‘New’ Legends: Some Perspectives from Anthropology,” Western Folklore, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Jan. 1990): 121-133. Gregory Forth, “Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe,” Folklore, Volume 118, Issue 3 (2007): 261-281. Myra L. Shackley, Wildmen: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal 59 cultures could have influenced the development of the figure in nineteenth-century Euro-

American culture, the evidence is not strong. As we will see in Chapter Seven, the appropriation of Wild Man figures from Native American cultures by Euro-Americans and Euro-Canadians was instrumental in the creation of the modern Big Foot/Sasquatch figure. However, there is little in the historic record to suggest that Wild Man figures in

Native American cultures greatly influenced those of Euro-Americans prior to the twentieth century. One of the earliest collectors and publishers of Native American folklore, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, used the term “little wild Man of the mountains” to translate the mythic Odjibwa figure of Pcck Wudj Ininee.2 The Alabama Intelligencer reported in 1829 of a Choctaw belief in a “mysterious wild man of the woods, who can confer supernatural powers.”3 But the creatures described in these stories were more supernatural figures than the transformed human appearing in Euro-American culture.

Instead it appears, as in the case of the Wild People of the Navidad, that the existence of

Native Americans and Euro-American memory of Native Americans had far more impact on the development of the figure than did a transmission of Native American culture.

Wild Men or Wild Men-like figures also make an appearance in African

American folk culture. One of the characters among the African American Mardi Gras

Indian troops of Louisiana is the Wild Man. The derivation of the figure is unclear,

Enigma (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983). John R. Napier, Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1972). Also see various articles in Marjorie M. Halpin and Michael M. Ames, eds., Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980). 2 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Algic Researches: Comprising Inquiries Respecting the Mental Vol. II (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1839), 78, 89.

3 As quoted in the Sandusky Clarion, December 12, 1829.

60 although there is a tradition of Wild Men taking part in Lenten plays in Europe.4

Nineteenth-century African Americans seem to have shared the Euro-American belief that a prolonged period of isolation in the wilderness could result in a person becoming covered in hair like a Wild Man. Such is the case in the story of “Uncle Alf” that former slave Dora Franks told a WPA worker in Mississippi. According to Franks, after Alf was captured following an escape attempt,

Dey took and give him 100 lashes wid de cat of ninety-nine tails and his back was something awful. Dey put him in de field to work right after dat too while de blood was still runnin'. He work right hard til dey left and he got up to de end of de row next to de swamp and he lit out again. Dey never found him dat time but dey tole me he found him a cave and fix him up a room whar he could live.... When de war was over and de slaves was freed he come out and I saw him. He looked like a really hairy ape, 'thout no clothes on and hair growin' all over his body. But he tole us he was glad he had done what he had cause he never could have stood another whuppin' 'thout killin' somebody and course he knew what dat would have meant.5 Franks does not use the term Wild Man to describe Alf. However, Alf's transformation from normal human being into one covered in hair as a result of living away from other human beings in a cave is highly reminiscent of most Wild Man stories. However, neither of these Wild Man figures from African Americans possess elements that seem unique to

African American culture.

Federal Writers Project worker Donnell van De Voort collected a very different type of African American Wild Man tale from Alabama, that of “Wiley and the Hairy

4 See David Elliott Draper, The Mardi Gras Indians: The Ethnomusicology of Black Associations in New Orleans (Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1973). 5 Dora Franks in George P. Rawick, The American slave: a composite autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

61 Man.” In the story, Wiley, the son of a bad man and a woman skilled at conjuring, outwitted the Hairy Man with his mother's help. The Hairy Man was “sure ugly and his grin didn’t help much. He was hairy all over. His eyes burned like fire and spit drooled all over his big teeth.” Though the Hairy Man could be interpreted as a devil rather than a

Wild Man—he had cow hooves and he carried a sack with which he could take Wiley away—this was nevertheless evidence that a hairy body was associated with inhumanity in American folk cultures.6 The Hairy Man may also have derived from African stories about hairy witches or cannibals.7

Folktales of hairy Wild Man-like figures were not confined to the African-

American community, however, as folklorists were able to collect such stories from

Euro-Americans well into the twentieth century. Folklorist Leonard Roberts collected many tales from inhabitants of the Kentucky mountains in the 1950s that featured a man who impregnated a female “Yeahoh” after living in a cave with her. After the baby was born, he attempted to flee the Yeahoh, but she would not let him leave. Finally he boarded a ship and escaped, which caused the Yeahoh to rip the baby in half and throw one half after him. One version of the story collected by Roberts in 1954 describes the creature as “a woman but was right hairy all over.” The man and the hairy woman had a child, one half of whom was hairy while the other half was “slick.” When the man left her, she used her long nails to cut the child in half, throwing the man the hairy half.8 This

6 Benjamin Albert Botkin, A Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People (New York: Crown Publishers, 1944), 682.

7 William Hugh Jansen, “Review: Nigerian Folk Tales by Barbara K. Walker and Warren S. Walker” Western Folklore, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April, 1963): 144-145.

8 Leonard W. Roberts, South from Hell-Fer-Sartin; Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales (Lexington: University 62 type of story was not confined to the Appalachians. Richard M. Dorson recorded essentially the same story in Maine in the 1950s, but in this case the “Yoho” was a man who threw half a baby at a “civilized” girl after she leaves him. Most likely, the preponderance of such stories in the Appalachian region was not a result of the region being a location where ancient folktales were preserved by an isolated population, but rather because that region is where folklore collectors went looking for them.9

The terms “Yeahoh” or “Yoho” for the hairy creatures featured in these tales are derived from the “Yahoos” of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s Yahoos were a near-perfect example of Wild Men in a major work of literature, possessing all the characteristics of the figure but social isolation. Like Wild Men, Yahoos were not merely human beings who behave in a sub-human manner; rather, their condition was marked by the hair that covered their heads, breasts and backs.10 Gulliver’s Travels was one of the best-selling books of the late eighteenth century and seems to have left an indelible imprint on American culture. One fan was noted backwoodsman Daniel Boone, who wrote, “In the yr. 1770 I encamped on Red River with five other men, and we had with us for our amusement the History of Samuel Gulliver's Travels.” Boone named a creek and a

of Kentucky Press, 1955). Leonard Roberts, “Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains,” Western Folklore, Vol. 16 (Jan. 1957): 48-51.

9 Richard M. Dorson, “The Legend of Yoho Cove,” Western Folklore Vol. 18, No. 4 (Oct., 1959): 329- 331. See also Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

10 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part IV chapter 2 (Facsimile of London: Benj. Motte, 1726, in Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976), 2.

63 trading camp after Swift’s fictional land of Lulbegrud.11 But most strikingly, he enjoyed telling the story of about how he killed a Yahoo in the wilderness, a creature he described as a ten-foot tall hairy man.12 The popularity of the story among men like Boone could perhaps account for the persistence of Yahoo stories in the region into the twentieth century.

Swift's work was not the only piece of European literature featuring a Wild Man figure that left a lasting impact on American culture. The story of Valentine and Orson did as well. English writer Henry Watson translated Valentine and Orson in 1510 from the French prose text Valentine et Orson, which itself was a version of the poetic

Valentine und Namelos which may date back to as early as the Carolingian period. At the heart of all versions of the story are two separated brothers. Valentine grows up in court civilization and becomes a knight. Orson or Namelos grows up in the forest and becomes a Wild Man of the Woods. The two brothers eventually reunite and go on to perform heroic deeds together.13 The 1805 American printing of the story by New York publisher

T.B. Jansen calls Orson a wild man and describes him as possessing great bodily strength and lacking speech. The text does not mention his body being covered in hair, but the front illustration is a print of Orson attacking a king that depicts him as a man covered in hair.14 The work was particularly popular as a children’s book. There were some seventy- four editions of the work published in English prior to 1919 and publishers in Boston,

11 Tom Burns Haber, “Gulliver's Travels' in America,” American Speech, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1936): 99- 100.

12 John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 309.

13 Henry Watson and Arthur Dickson, Valentine and Orson (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 1-4.

14 The Adventures of Valentine and Orson: A Tale for Youth (New York: T.B. Jansen, 1805). 64 Philadelphia and New York put out editions in America during the course of the nineteenth century.

In 1804, English playwright Thomas Dibdin turned the epic into a play, and between 1840 and 1850 it was particularly popular in American theaters. In 1841, the

Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia staged a version of the play for children. In 1850, a Milwaukee theater put on Didbin’s version of the play. In New York, such theaters as

Barnum Museum in 1856 and The New York Bowery Theater in 1858 staged it. In 1866, a burlesque theater in New York adapted it and renamed it Valiant Valentine.15 The popularity of the book and plays certainly accounts for some of the prominence of the

Wild Man image in America. In fact, papers like the New York Times referred to Wild

Men as “Modern Orson[s].”16

These works of literature embody two types of European Wild Men that greatly influenced the development of the figure in America. The Orson story was quite similar to the stories about the Wild People of the Navidad as lost white children transformed by a life in the local wilderness. Orson's wildness was not inherent to him but rather resulted from his upbringing in the wilderness. His brother who grew up in civilization was a normal human and Orson, once removed from the forest, became a fully functioning member of the community. The wilderness that transformed Orson was not some strange or distant land but the nearby forest in which the court periodically hunted. Swift’s

15 Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, January 2, 1841. New York Daily Times, December 8, 1855, 8. New York Daily Times, January 12, 1856, 5. New York Times, April 6, 1866, 7. “Amusements this Evening,” New York Times, April 7, 1866, 4. Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette, November 2, 1850, 2.

16 “A Modern Orson,” New York Times, July 23, 1870. “Amusements this Evening,” New York Times. April 7, 1866, 4.

65 Yahoos, on the other hand, were part of the European tradition that assumed monstrous human beings inhabited strange and distant lands. To understand these two traditions of

European Wild Men and their influence on the development of the figure in America, it is necessary to look back on their historic lineage.

The Wild Man figure is an ancient one in Western culture. The earliest appearance of a Wild Man is as a central character of the world’s oldest known work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the first tablet of the standard Akkadian edition of the epic, the goddess Aruru created a being that would be as powerful as the hero,

Gilgamesh. Aruru took a piece of clay and threw it into the wilderness. That piece of clay became Enkidu, a man whose silent, incredibly strong body was covered in shaggy hair.

The Wild Man Enkidu knew neither people nor settled life and instead ate and lived like an animal. After Enkidu caused problems for hunters from the city, a prostitute tamed him and brought him to civilization, where he eventually became the friend and sidekick of Gilgamesh. In both his silent, strong, hairy body, and as a creature that terrorized a civilized community but is eventually captured and incorporated into the life of the city,

Enkidu was the template for future Wild Man stories.17

Other Wild Man figures, some of supernatural origin, inhabited the ancient

Mediterranean and Europe. The “lahmu” or “Hairy Man” was a naked, longhaired figure wielding a staff common to ancient Mesopotamian art. The Old Testament is likewise populated by “hairy men” such as Samson, Esau, and the Babylon King,

17 Gregory Mobley, “The Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 116, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), 220. David Arthur Wells, The Wild Man from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Hartman Von Aue's Iwein: Reflections on the Development of a Theme in World Literature (Belfast: Queen's University of Belfast), 1975.

66 Nebenzeenchuzer, who was cursed by God to live like an animal. Beings perhaps more directly connected to the genealogy of the American Wild Man were the sylvan gods of ancient Europe, such as Roman gods Silvanus and Orcus. The Greeks believed in a variety of Wild figures who inhabited the wild spaces within their world, including centaurs, satyrs, Cyclopes, and giants. In the Teutonic tradition, the being known as

“Herlekin” or “Hellekin” gave rise to figures as diverse as Herne the Hunter in British folklore and Harlequin on the French stage.18 All these mythological beings were connected to the underworld and vegetation and were invoked in seasonal celebrations.

They may have not only influenced the development of the Wild Man figure but also the image of the devil in western culture as a hairy human.

These seasonal celebrations are the best evidence of the continuity between the ancient images of hairy men and the medieval and early modern European figure of the

Wild Man. Plays featuring Wild Men were a part of European festivals during the Lenten season from as early as the thirteenth century, and in some places they continue to this day. The earliest known Wild Man plays, outside those of ancient Greece, date from

1208, when the citizens of Padua in northwestern Italy put on a play about “homine salvatico.” Individuals dressed as Wild Men were a prominent part of the Nuremberg festival of Schembart. Wild Man plays were even popular among European royalty.

Among the items listed in a wardrobe inventory of Edward III was a Wodewose (wild man) mask. In 1392, a Wild Man play held by Charles VI resulted in the death of a

18 Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 10-13. Robert Lima, The Genealogy of Harlequin as Diabolus (Szeged, Hungary: JATEPress, 2002), 84.

67 number of performers when spectators accidentally lit their flax costumes on fire. The

1501 wedding of a British prince featured a pageant carried on by Wild Men. During the sixteenth century, Wild Men performers were a fixture of the annual Lord Mayor of

London show. They also populated Italian pastoral comedies and various types of

Spanish plays.19

The most common and significant type of ritual Wild Man play, however, was the hunt. Two Dutch works, one a woodcut, the other a painting from the mid sixteenth- century, depict Wild Man hunts. In these plays, a hunter would chase a Wild Man from his wilderness abode and catch and chain him. The civil authorities would then try him for his crimes before carrying the Wild Man away for ritual execution, after which his body might be dumped into a pond, lake or river. In some plays, a woman lures the Wild

Man from his abode, as was the case in the story of Enkidu, while in others he is tried by an emperor.20 Bernheimer argues that the medieval Wild Man play was the continuation of pagan rituals and pageants associated with vegetation, seasonal changes and the underworld.21

The narrative of the hunting and capture of the Wild Man was also a common trope outside the festival plays, appearing in literature intended for both the stage and other formats. Wild Men and Wild Men hunts were present in a number of epics and

19 Robert H. Goldsmith, “The Wild Man on the English Stage,” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (October., 1958): 481-491. Timothy Husband and G. Gilmore-House, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 150. Oleh Mazur, The Wild Man in the Spanish Renaissance & Golden Age Theater: A comparative Study including the Indio, the Bárbaro and their Counterparts in European Lore (Ann Arbor: Published for Villanova University by University Microfilms International, 1980).

20 Bernheimer, 50-54. Husband, 157-158.

21 Bernheimer, 43, 76-77.

68 romances during this period. The German epics Wolfdietrich, Der Busant, and Deietrich

Drachenkaempf all featured Wild Men and Wild Men hunts, as did Spencer’s Faeire

Queene and Chretien de Troyes' Yvain. All told, there were likely hundreds of plays, epics, romances and other medieval and early modern European literary works that featured Wild Men and their capture.22 Most of these literary Wild Men were no longer the supernatural beings of pagan European culture but rather, like Orson, humans who transformed into hairy and powerful Wild Men after being lost in the woods.

Art historian Richard Bernheimer, who in his Wild Men in the Middle Ages first identified the significance of the Wild Man figure in European culture, described the typical creature as a “hairy man curiously compounded of human and animal traits, without, however, sinking to the level of an ape.” In classic medieval European thought, the Wild Man lived in isolation in the wilderness, subsisting on wild foods and lacking any of the material benefits of civilization, such as agricultural tools and, in some cases, speech. All he possessed was an uprooted tree that he used as a mace and the great physical prowess that resulted from his daily struggle to survive in his wilderness abode.23

In medieval and early modern thought, the Wild Man was not a separate act of

God's creation, a link between man and ape in the great chain of being or a supernatural entity. Instead, the Wild Man was a being who was once human but descended to his present state due to circumstances beyond his control. Once freed from the influences

22 Ibid.

23 Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 4, 9, 12, and 19.

69 which produced his descent into Wildness, he could return to the community of humanity. The circumstances that resulted in the Wild Man’s descent were many. He could have become mad from love, grief, or battle; he could have become lost in the woods as a child or later in life. Whatever the cause of his alienation from society, his inhabitation of the wilderness where he had to battle both the elements and wild creatures resulted in the transformation of his body into something both hairy and powerful. 24

The Wild Man held a prominent role in medieval and early modern Europe, appearing not only in literature and plays but also as an artistic motif found everywhere from church carvings and heraldic devices to saltcellars.25 Bernheimer argues that the

Wild Man's prominence stemmed from the figure as a “focus of man's various instincts and desires.” As a being whose wildness made him the embodiment of that which was outside European Christian society, the Wild Man was a repudiation of the “hieratic order upon which medieval society was founded.”26 Richard Bartra, in his Wild Men in the

Looking Glass and Artificial Savage: The Modern Wild Man Myth, argues that Wild Man figures cannot be a distorted reflection of non-Europeans peoples because they predate the European encounter with non-western peoples. Instead, the Wild Man is an internal other used by Western civilization to define itself, since it was impossible to develop the notion of civilization without a myth of its opposition.27 Yet as we will see, the Wild Man figure’s relationship to distant peoples was a complicated one, for while the Wild Man

24 Ibid., 8, and 14.

25 See Timothy Husband and Gloria Gilmore-House, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980) for the best examples of the Wild Man as an artistic motif.

26 Bernheimer, 19-20, and 121.

27 Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, 206-208. 70 figure may not have originated in the European encounter with other peoples, it impacted those encounters when they took place.

Europeans as early as Herodotus used the Wild Man figure to imagine what non-

European peoples were like. Following Alexander the Great’s conquests, ancient writers wrote of marvelous races of Wild Men in India. This tradition continued into the medieval period when the fictive Alexandrian Romances helped perpetuate the idea that distant lands were the location of Wild Men, as did the continued popularity of ancient geographers like Pliny the Elder. Medieval and early modern travel books like the

Travels of John Mandeville, those by Edward Webbe, and the works of reputable scholars such as Roger Bacon located Wild Men in distant lands such as the Kingdom of Prester

John. While early foreign Wild Men, like those appearing in the nineteenth-century manuscript The Marvels of the East, were of diverse appearance, after the fifteenth century, foreign illustrators drew foreign Wild Men like the hairy wild men of Germanic culture.28

Early modern academics attempted to reconcile the new information about foreign peoples streaming in from European explorers with their previously existing Wild Man lore. They did so by locating the place of Wild Men and foreign people within God's order. Geiler Von Kayserberg, a German pulpit orator, grouped Wild Men into five categories in his sermons: solitary hermits, wild man proper or sacchani, wild creatures of foreign lands or hyspani, pygmies, and demonic beings. In his Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pigmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus, the physician Paracelsus attempted to explain the actual nature of the imaginary creatures of European folklore.

28 Bernheimer, 86-90.

71 Paracelsus argued that the Wild Men, or sylphs, are a separate creation of God, resembling man but made from courser materials. The classification of the Wild Man of

European lore was only the beginning of the challenges early modern European intellectuals faced. They also had to identify and define the inhabitants of the new world.29

It might seem likely that Europeans would understand Native Americans to be

Wild Men. After all, Native Americans inhabited a distant land, dressed in ways that did not conform to European norms, and possessed cultures radically different from that of

Europe. Literary Wild Man figures such as Shakespeare's Caliban were inhabitants of these newly discovered lands. Philosophers like Hobbes described America as existing in a state of nature in which all men were Wild, living without culture or society.30 The

Wild Man myth posited that individuals whose way of life appeared to Europeans as primitive were closer to nature, less human, immoral, sexually dangerous, fundamentally inferior, and natural slaves. This myth had a long-term impact on how Europeans and

Euro-Americans understood Native Americans.31

Like the Wild Man, the pygmy was a persistent idea in Western culture from ancient times, useful for thinking about human origins and human difference. Kairn A.

Klieman has argued that the “Idea of the Pygmy,” which predates any European contact

29 Ibid., 199. Bartra, 150-153.

30 See Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, chapters 3 and 4.

31 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 203.

72 with equatorial hunting peoples of small stature, had a major impact on how those peoples were treated following contact with Africa.32

Yet while the Wild Man image was instrumental in crystallizing the idea that

“primitive” peoples were inhuman and inferior, Europeans in America quickly realized that Native Americans were fundamentally different than the creatures of European imagination. Columbus expected to find monstrous Wild Men and stated in letters that he was surprised not to find any.33 While some church officials like Juan Gines de

Sepulveda believed that the inhabits of the new world were natural slaves, Bartra illustrates that church officials quickly determined that Native Americans did not live without society or culture as a Wild Man might but rather suffered from a diabolical influence on their culture. Only a few, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that native peoples suffered from a total lack of culture and from the influence of a harmful climate.34 In any case, Europeans in the Americas quickly recognized that the peoples they encountered were not hairy Wild Men. As Bartra points out, traditional European

Wild Men appear as carvings in Yucatan and in the Royal Chapel in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and most dramatically in a play put on in the central square of Mexico City to celebrate peace between Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France in 1538.35 The image of the hairy Wild Man, distinct from the image of the Native American savage, persisted in

European cultures in both the old world and the new.

32 Kairn A. Klieman, "The Pygmies Were Our Compass": Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to C. 1900 C.E. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 5-11.

33 Friedman, 199.

34 Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, 83-86.

35 Ibid., 2-7.

73 While in the sixteenth century Europeans discovered that distant lands were not inhabited by Wild Men, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europeans did encounter beings that they saw as Wild Men in places distant and near. Beginning in the mid-1600s, European intellectuals scrutinized creatures that today are known as the members of the family Hominidae: chimpanzees (Pan), gorillas (Gorilla) and orangutans

(Pongo). In studying, contemplating, and dissecting these creatures, European intellectuals fused the Wild Man myth with the beginnings of western science and sought to answer the question of what humans are.

In 1698, naturalist Edward Tyson engaged in the first dissection of an ape, probably a juvenile Bonobo brought to London, and in 1699 he published the result of the dissection in a work entitled “Orang-Outang sive Homo Sylvestrus, or the Anatomy of a

Pygmie compared with that of a monkey, and Apes, and a Man: to which is added a

Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs and the

Sphinges of the Ancients, wherein it will appear that they were all either Apes or

Monkeys; and not Men, as formerly pretended.”36 Tyson's work was an anatomy of the creature that he alternatively named Wild Man, Pygmy or Orang-Outang. But the work went further than that, as Tyson argued that such creatures constituted the missing link between men and the apes on the great chain of being and were the inspiration for the ancient myth of satyrs and Wild Men. In his work, Tyson recast the Wild Man figure as

36 Edward Tyson and Michael van der Gucht, Orang-Outang, Sive, Homo Sylvestris, or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man To Which Is Added, A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs and Sphinges of the Ancients: Wherein It Will Appear That They Are All Either Apes or Monkeys, and Not Men, As Formerly Pretended (London: Printed for Thomas Bennet ... and Daniel Brown ... and are to be had of Mr. Hunt, 1699).

74 an object of scientific study and updated the Aristotelian great chain of being of man and animals.37

In drawing his pygmy, he depicts a creature identifiable to modern eyes as an ape.

Tyson believed that the creature normally walked erect and depicted it as such.

Curiously, he has the creature supporting its upright stance with a stick. This motif of ape-man-with-stick can be found in a depiction of anthropometric figures from the fifteenth century and was repeated in the drawings found in the collaboration of Carl Von

Linne (also known as Carolus Linnaeus) and C. E. Hoppius, as well as Buffon’s

“Nistooire Naturelle.”38 The popularity and influence of Tyson’s work stemmed in part from his invocation and reworking of familiar images such as the great chain of being, the Wild Man, and the anthropomorphic figure with a stick.39 The pygmy’s stick evokes the Wild Man's club but also suggests that the pygmy as a tool-user is closer to a human being than a mere animal is.

Tyson’s dissection was the culmination of the late seventeenth- century discovery of the Orang-Outang. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Orang-Outang should not be mistaken for the members of the genus Pongo that inhabited the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, which today bear the name orangutan. Richard Nash argues that while the

37 Klieman, chapter 1.

38 Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, 159. Roger Bartra, The Artificial Savage: Modern Myths of the Wild Man (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 218.

39 Frank Spencer, “Pithekos to Pithecanthropus: an abbreviated review of changing scientific views on the relationship of the anthropoid apes to Homo,” in Ape, man, apeman: changing views since 1600: evaluative proceedings of the Symposium ... Leiden, the Netherlands, 28 June-July, 1993, ed. Corbey, Raymond, and Bert Theunissen (Leiden: Dept. of Prehistory, Leiden University, 1995), 13-27. J.M.M.H. Thijssen, “Reforging the great chain of being: the Medieval discussion of the human status of ‘pygmies’ and its influence on Edward Tyson” in Ape, man, apeman: changing views since 1600 : evaluative proceedings of the Symposium ... Leiden, the Netherlands, 28 June-July, 1993, ed. Corbey, Raymond, and Bert (Theunissen Leiden: Dept. of Prehistory, Leiden University, 1995), 43.

75 term derived from the Malay word for “man of the forest,” which was generally used by

Malay people to refer to Pongo, the first European to use the term was the Dutch physician Nicolas Tulp in his 1641 Observationes Medicea, in which he describes a creature brought to him by the Dutch East India company from Anglo. Tulp also referred to a creature, most likely either a chimpanzee or binobo, as an Indian Satyr and Homo sylvestis. Tulp’s drawing of his Homo Sylvestris depicts a creature that to modern eyes is a stylized great ape.40

In 1658, another Dutch physician, Jacob Bontius, published a description of an

Orang-Outang in his “Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis libri sex.”41

Bontius, who worked for the Dutch East India Company in Java, described a member of the Pongo genus. However, the work was published over two decades after Bontius's death in the East Indies and was reshaped by another Dutch physician, William Piso.

Historian Harold J. Cook, a leading expert on Bontius, argues that the description of the

Orang-Outang in “Historiae Naturalasis et Medicae Indiae oreientalis” was, in fact, an addition by Piso. Most certainly, the highly influential picture that accompanied the description would not have been used by anyone who had actually seen a Pongo up close.42 While Tyson believed that the Wild Man he dissected was its own species, historian Richard Nash argues that eighteenth-century thinkers saw all Wild Men, regardless of whether they called them Orang-Outangs, pygmies, gorillas or even the

40 Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).

41 Jacob Bontius and W. Piso, Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae Orientalis libri sex (Amstelaedami: apud Ludovicum et Danielem Elzevirios, 1658).

42 Harold John Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

76 literary yahoo, as essentially the same type of creature, one which “differ[s] in degree but not in kind from man.”43

This unity of Wild Men was best expressed by Linnaeus in the 1766 edition of his attempt to organize all living creatures, “Systema Naturae.” In each of his editions

Linnaeus attempted to better understand the relationship between men, apes, and feral human beings. While in earlier editions Linnaeus was less clear of their inter-relationship, in the 1766 edition Linnaeus divided the genus Homo in two subgenera, Homo diurnus and Homo nocturnus. The latter were the “Troglodyte,” whose image was based on or at least drew upon a common source from Bontius’s Orang-Outang, “Lucifer,” the maimed, breasted, stick-carrying creature from Bernhard von Breydenbach’s “Fifteenth Journey to the Holy Land.” Lucifer was likely based on a baboon, the “Satyre” which was based on a print of “Madame Chimpanzee,” a chimpanzee exhibited in a London coffee house in

1738-39, and “Pygmee,” based upon Tyson’s drawing of his “Pygmie.” Homo dirnus included all races of Homo sapien and two other species, Homo Monstrous and Homo

Ferus. Homo Monstrous included abnormal humans such as dwarfs and giants. Homo

Ferus, on the other hand, were human beings with bestial traits such as being four-footed

(using hands to walk), hairiness and muteness. While he removed these examples in

1766, in the 1758 edition Linnaeus used actual feral people as his examples of Homo

Ferus, such as Peter of Hanover and the Wild Girl of Champagne. 44

43 Richard Nash, 30.

44 Carolus Linnaeus, Caroli Linnaei ... Systema naturae (Holmiae: impensis direct Laurentii Salvii, 1758). Christ. Emman Hoppius and Car Linnaeus, Dissertatio acad. in qua anthropomorpha (1760). Carolus Linnaeus, Caroli a Linné Systema naturæ per regni tria naturæ, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis (Holmiæ: Impensis Laurentii Salvii, 1766). Richard Nash, 15-41. Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 15-16. John G. 77 Within the genus Homo, Linnaeus brought together the two types of Wild Man figures, the distant savage Wild Men of European legend known today as chimpanzees, binobos, orangutans, gorillas, and feral children transformed by their wilderness life.

While some Enlightenment thinkers would dispute Linnaeus’ conclusion about these two types of beings and their relationship to human beings, many did follow Linnaeus’s pattern of considering them together. In 1764-1765, James Burnet, who would become

Lord Monboddo in 1767, traveled to France, where he visited both types of Wild Men, the Wild Girl of Champagne, named Memmie Le Blanc, and an Orang-Outang—in this case a chimpanzee. He would later visit Peter, the Wild Boy of Hanover. Monboddo argued that both feral children and Orang-Outangs were types of men, and that what defined humanness was not physical features but rather speech, intelligence and sociability.45

The literature on feral children is extensive because scholars, both historic and contemporary, have looked to them to understand human nature. Feral children like

Romulus and Remus populated European myths. Stories like the Wild Boy of Hesse, who was raised by wolves, or the Wild Boys found among bears in Lithuania, appear in the works of early modern European scholars. These stories drew upon the same theme, the role of nature versus nurture, that made the story of Orson so interesting. But three feral children, Peter of Hanover, Memmie Le Blanc, and Victor of Aveyron, who were

Burke, “The Wild Man’s Pedigree: Scientific Method and Racial Anthropology,” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Edward J. Dudley, and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 259-280. Frank Spencer, 13-27.

45 Alan Barnard, "Monboddo's Orang Outang and the Definition of Man," in Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views Since 1600, eds. Raymond Corbey & Bert Theunissen (Leiden: Dept. of Prehistory, Leiden Univ., 1995), 71-85.

78 captured in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, were most prominent, and their stories placed feral children at the heart of Enlightenment discourses on human nature.46

In 1725, Peter, the Wild Boy of Hanover, appeared before George I, King of

England and Elector of Hanover. In May of the prior year, the residents of Hameln,

Germany had spotted the boy running naked in the fields and forest. Residents captured him and eventually handed the boy over to the attendant of the house of correction at

Zell, who then presented him to the King. The King ordered that provisions be made for the wild boy’s care and education. By 1826, Peter arrived in England, where he aroused considerable curiosity in the court. Eventually Dr. John Arbuthnot took responsibility for his care, but the doctor failed in his efforts to teach Peter English or otherwise domesticate him. Arbuthnot gave up his efforts at educating Peter and placed him with a farmer in Hertfordshire, who cared for Peter in exchange for a small pension. In 1785, at the age of 72, Peter died, having never developed the ability to speak more than a few words or engage in any type of complicated labor work.47

While Peter received considerable attention in the popular press, which repeated elaborate accounts of his capture and subsequent life, he was of most interest to scholars and writers. Arbuthnot, Defoe and Swift were the likely authors of or collaborators on a

46 Hayden White, “Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” and Maximillian E. Novak, “The Wild Man Comes to Tea,” in The Wild Man Within. Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2003). Roger Shattuck, The forbidden experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981). Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man, or of the First Developments, Physical and Moral, of the Young Savage Caught in the Woods Near Aveyron, in the Year 1798 (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1802). Adriana S. Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006). Nancy Yousef, “Savage or Solitary? The Wild Child and Rousseau’s Man of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 62 No. 2 (2001):245-263.

47 Richard Nash, 41-63.

79 series of pamphlets published soon after the boy’s arrival in England, which used him as a foil with which to explore human nature and critique English society. Other unknown authors produced additional pamphlets, treatises and poems about Peter. Some of these works described Peter as a Wild Man, suckled by a beast but “not hairy,” while others saw him more as Rousseau’s “natural man,” or at least a blank slate.48

In 1731, another feral child emerged from the woods of Europe when she was caught by a shepherd while eating frogs in a vineyard in the Champagne region of

France. The shepherd brought her to the castle of the local lord, who kept her for two months before handing her over to a church, which placed her in a hospice for poor children. Unlike Peter, Mademoiselle LeBlanc quickly learned French and acclimated herself to French society. For a time she lived in various convents, first in Chalon and then in Paris, though she suffered when her various patrons died. Afflicted with ill health, she lived her later days dependent upon those interested in visiting the former wild girl.

Once civilized, however, she ceased to be of much interest and almost nothing is known of her life or death after 1765.

While those who wrote about Peter saw him as either a truly feral child raised by wolves or merely an idiot, scholars saw Mademoiselle LeBlanc as a savage of non-

French origins. While some depictions and descriptions of LeBlanc are based on Wild

Men, such as where she is depicted as hairy, powerful and carrying a club, other accounts of her life and capture suggest that she was somehow originally of the French Antilles.

Historian Nancy Douthwaite argues that LeBlanc was of interest to French intellectuals because she violated the norms of French female behavior, rather than because she served

48 Novak, 185-188. Newton, 24-25. Douthwaite, 21-28.

80 like Peter before her as an object of philosophical contemplation. Her eventual transformation into a mild-mannered French woman merely demonstrated to those who educated her the ability of French civilization to rescue human nature from its original savagery. 49

While LeBlanc’s story ceased to be of great interest to the French, she continued to capture the interest of British readers. English publishers produced about a dozen short chapbooks between 1795 and 1831, all entitled The Surprising Savage Girl, Caught Wild

In the Woods, based on a largely fictive French biography. Douthwaite attributes the continued popularity of the story to the vibrant Evangelical movement in Britain during these years, as within this context LeBlanc’s redemption from the Wilderness and conversion to Christianity was particularly meaningful.50

The final feral child of eighteenth-century Europe was able to elude his captors for about a year while he survived by gathering nuts in the forests of south central France.

After villagers captured and displayed the wild boy in 1798, he managed to escape, only to find himself caught again the next summer. Living for a short time under the care of a widow, he escaped again to the mountains of Aveyron, until January 8, 1800, when he entered captivity for final time. The French state bureaucracy brought him to Paris and placed him under the care of Dr. Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard. For several years Itard educated Victor, as the feral child would eventually be known, until in 1807, when he abandoned the youth and gave him to the care of another elderly widow. In 1816, Julien-

Joseph Virey, a naturalist, visited him, and in 1828 Victor died. Unlike Peter and

49 Douthwaite, 36-37. Newton, 5.

50 Douthwaite, 48-49.

81 LeBlanc, Victor was examined and cared for by the medical institution of post- revolutionary France.51

By the early nineteenth century, European culture contained within it a multiplicity of Wild Men figures. Communities across Europe still held Wild Man pageants, and Wild Men reminiscent of those of medieval Europe continued to appear in art, place names and local legends. The Wild Man was also a part of European literary culture, appearing in both reworked ancient tales and also new works based upon that tradition. The Wild Man had become a part of scientific and philosophical discourse in the form of the Orang-Outang and the Wild Child. Thus European culture was so saturated with Wild Man figures that as Europeans came to the Americas, they brought with them their Wild Man lore.

As Lawrence Levin argued in Highbrow/Lowbrow, cultural hierarchies were weak or non-existent in early nineteenth-century America.52 Thus, figures and images from what might today be called elite or high culture were just as much a part of American cultures that might be variously called popular, mass or folk. In America, the various sources of the European Wild Man tradition came together and were reshaped by

American society. Stories about feral children, which in Europe were the topic of philosophical discussion, appear in American almanacs. Orang-Outangs in America appeared in menageries, circuses and popular museums. Wild Man figures, like Orson or

Yahoos, were read about in literature, watched in plays, or told about as part of a western

51 Richard Nash, 157-157.

52 Lawrence W Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).

82 tall tale.

This mixing of high and popular culture was characteristic of the Orang-Outangs populating European scientific and geographic texts. While based on reports of great apes, including what is now referred to as the orangutan, American depictions of these creatures in words and in text convey a creature far more similar to a human-animal hybrid than to an ape. Almost all early American images of the creature depict it standing upright and using a wooden club, be it from Bickerstaff's Boston almanack, for the year of our Lord 1769 or the children’s book People of All Nations A Useful Toy for Girl or

Boy.53 William Mavor, in his “Complete System of Natural History,” describes the Pango or “Ourang Outang” as resembling a man “in all respects but its superior magnitude.”

John Quincy, in The American Medical Lexicon, includes the Wild Man, “four footed, mute and hairy,” in his varieties of Homo sapien. 54

But Orang-Outangs appeared in more than just scientific texts in early America.

They were also physically present on the continent. Historian Brett Mizzell reveals numerous cases where Americans exhibited apes as intermediaries between man and beast. Mizzel argues that, although few Americans saw such creatures prior to the

Revolution, they were aware of them from numerous descriptions that appeared in written media. After the Revolution, however, Americans had increasing opportunities to

53 Benjamin West and John Dickinson, Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack For the Year of Our Lord 1769 (Boston: Mein and Fleeming, 1768). People of All Nations A Useful Toy for Girl or Boy (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1807).

54 William Fordyce Mavor, A Complete System of Natural History Founded on the Linnæ an Arrangement of Animals, with Popular Descriptions in the Manner of Goldsmith and Buffon : Representing Upwards of One Hundred and Seventy of the Most Curious Objects (Philadelphia: Printed by P. Byrne, 1802), 25. John Quincy, The American Medical Lexicon On the Plan of Quincy's Lexicon Physico-Medicum: with Many Retrenchments, Additions, and Improvements (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1811). 83 observe Orang-Outangs in exhibitions.55 In 1793, a Germantown, Pennsylvania man exhibited a baboon in a barrel as “half man, half beast,” while a riot nearly broke out in

Boston in 1806 when a crowd discovered that the “nondescript biped” they were observing was actually a bear which the exhibitors had shaved.56 Several of these exhibitions played upon the idea that Orang-Outangs were Wild Men. An advertisement for an animal show in a November 1789 edition of the Massachusetts Sentinel called the creature “the surprising species of the Ourang Outang, or Wild Man of the woods.”

Charles Wilson Peale likewise advertised the Orang-Outang he held in his Philadelphia museum as a “Wild Man of the Woods.”57 Thus, in the early Republic, scientific knowledge mixed with entertainment and showmen combined images of great apes with images of Wild Men.

This process of mixing and reworking images and figures from European culture is present in one of the most common locations for Wild Man lore in America prior to the

1830s, American almanacs and newspapers. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines and journals republished Wild Man stories, particularly those of

Peter, LeBlanc and Victor.58 At least six different Wild Man stories appeared in various

55 Brett Mizzell, “'Man Cannot Behold it Without Contemplating Himself': Monkeys, Apes and Human Identity in the Early American Republic," in Explorations in Early American Culture: A Supplemental Issue of Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 144-173.

56 Ibid., 144, 158.

57 Ibid., 159, 162.

58 “Peter the Wild Boy,” Boston Investigator, Boston, MA, May 10, 1833. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, New York, NY: May 23, 1857, 380. “The Wild Girl of Champagne,” The Columbian Magazine, August 1788: 452-455. Constanc Saint Esteve, “Account of a WILD BOY found in the Wood of Lacaune,” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review, Vol. 2, Iss. 6 (June 1800): 449. The Boston Weekly Magazine, Devoted to Morality, Literature, Biography, History, the Fine Arts, Agriculture, &c. &c., Vol. 1, Iss. 6 (December 4, 1802): 23. “Curious particulars of Peter the wild boy, who was found in 84 American almanacs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all but one of which involved a Wild Man who was of interest to seventeenth- and eighteenth- century philosophers. Several almanacs discussed Peter of Hanover and some, such as The

Wilmington Almanac in 1787, did so at great length.59 The 1801 Dickson's Balloon

Almanac contained the latest details coming from France on Victor, the Wild Boy of

Aveyron. Thus, Americans in the decades surrounding the beginning of the nineteenth century had had multiple opportunities to read about the Wild Men of the European enlightenment.60

One of the most popular Wild Man stories from an American almanac was one the woods near Hanover, brought to England, and maintained by his majesty George the second,” The Wonderful Magazine, and Extraordinary Museum: Being a Complete Repository of the Wonders, Curiosities, and Varieties of, 1808: 386-389. “PETER, THE WILD BOY,” The Friendly Visitor, Being a Collection of Select and Original Pieces, Instructive and Entertaining, Suitable to be Read in All Families, Vol. 1, Iss. 5 (January 29, 1825): 36 -37. “PETER THE WILD BOY,” Traveller and Spirit of the Times,. Vol. 2, Iss. 138 (July 20, 1833): 1. “Wild People,” Robert Merry's Museum Vol. 12, Iss. 1 (July 1846): 9- 15.

59 John Tobler, The Wilmington almanack, or ephemeris, for the year of our Lord 1787 (Wilmington: Printed and sold by James Adams, 1786). John Israel, The Republican Calendar, for the Year of Our Lord 1802: ... Containing ... a Particular Account of the Number of Inhabitants, Buildings, Manufactories, Trades, Professions, Marriages, in the Town and Vicinity of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: Printed by John Israel, 1801). Zadok Cramer and John Israel, The Pittsburgh Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1802: ... Containing ... a Particular Account of the Number of Inhabitants, Buildings, Manufactories, Trades, Professions, Marriages, in the Town and Vicinity of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: Printed for Zadok Cramer, bookseller, by John Israel, 1801).

60 “Peter the Wild Boy,” Boston Investigator, May 10, 1833. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 23, 1857, 380. “The Wild Girl of Champagne,” The Columbian Magazine, (August 1788): 452-455. Constanc Saint Esteve, “Account of a WILD BOY found in the Wood of Lacaune,” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review,. Vol. 2, Iss. 6 (June 1800): 449. The Boston Weekly Magazine, Devoted to Morality, Literature, Biography, History, the Fine Arts, Agriculture, &c. &c. Vol. 1, Iss. 6 (December 4, 1802): 23. “Curious particulars of Peter the wild boy, who was found in the woods near Hanover, brought to England, and maintained by his majesty George the second,” The Wonderful Magazine, and Extraordinary Museum: Being a Complete Repository of the Wonders, Curiosities, and Varieties of, (1808): 386-389. “PETER, THE WILD BOY,” The Friendly Visitor, Being a Collection of Select and Original Pieces, Instructive and Entertaining, Suitable to be Read in All Families, Vol. 1, Iss. 5 (January 29, 1825):36 -37. “PETER THE WILD BOY,” Traveller and Spirit of the Times, Vol. 2, Iss. 138 (July 20, 1833): 1. “Wild People,” Robert Merry's Museum, Vol. 12 Iss. 1 (July 1846): 9-15. Dickson's Balloon Almanac, for the Year of Our Lord, 1801 Being the First Year of the 19th Century. Adapted to Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States (Lancaster, Pa.: Printed and sold by W. & R. Dickson, North Queenstreet, 1800).

85 cribbed from the writings of the French engineer J. J. S. Leroy (1746-1825). In his memoir about his experiences cutting timber in the Pyrenees region of France, he describes a Wild Man who inhabited the rocks near the edge of a mountain forest during the 1770s.61 Given to chasing sheep and approaching shepherds’ cabins and prone to laughter, the Wild Man was generally harmless. Yet his body was still monstrous. Those who saw him described him as “very tall and hairy like a bear.” Leroy explains that the

Wild Man was a human who was “lost in infancy and had subsisted on herbs.”62 The most commonly republished account in American almanacs was the one that most closely conformed to a classic Wild Man tale.

Thus when Americans created their own Wild Man stories, they had a rich tradition of Wild Man figures to draw on from Native American, African American and most prominently European cultures. But the Wild Man figure should not be considered as a mere transferal of a cultural figure from Europe to America. As we have seen in the case of the Wild People of the Navidad, Americans reshaped that figure to meet their own

61 J. J. Sebastien Le Roy, Mémoire sur les travaux qui ont rapport a l'exploitation de la mature dans les Pyrennées Avec une description des manœuvres & des machines employées pour parvenir à extraire les mats des forets & les rendre à l'entrepot de Bayonne , ... (Londres: et se trouve à Paris, chez Couturier pere. Couturier fils, 1776).

62 Joshua Sharp, The United States Almanac, for the Year of Our Lord, 1801 ... Calculated for Pennsylvania, but Will Serve Without Any Essential Variation, for Any of the Neighboring States (Reading, Pa.: Printed and sold by Jungmann and Bruckmann, in Callowhill-Street, 1800). Benjamin West, The North-American Calendar: or, The Rhode-Island Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord 1783 ... Calculated for the Meridian of Providence, in New-England, Lat. 41p0s 51' N. and Lon. 71p0s 16' W. but Will Serve, Without Sensible Error, for Any of the Neighbouring States (Providence: Printed by Bennett Wheeler, for Henry Barber, and sold by him at his office on the Parade, Newport, 1782). Benjamin West., The North- American Calendar, and Rhode-Island Register, for the Year of Our Lord 1782 ... Calculated for the Meridian of Providence, in New-England, Lat. 41⁰ 51' N. and Long. 71⁰ 16' W. but Will Serve, Without Sensible Error, for Any of the Neighbouring States (Providence: Printed by Bennett Wheeler, and sold at his office, on the west side of the Great Bridge, 1781). Asa Houghton, Houghton's Genuine Almanac, the Gentlemen's and Ladies' Diary and Almanac ... 1805 (Keene, N.H.: [Printed] by and for John Prentiss, 1804). Poulson's Town and Country Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord, 1807 (Philadelphia: Printed by John Bioren, for Kimber, Conrad, & Co, 1806).

86 needs in an environment and multi-racial society very different than that of Europe. Just as the Wild Men of Medieval Europe were different from the Orang-Outangs of the age of exploration or the feral children of the Enlightenment, so too were the Wild Men of

America. After all, in America the wild spaces which Wild Men were believed to inhabit were much more common, to say nothing of the much greater diversity of peoples who inhabited the continent.

Two works of fiction from the mid twentieth century can illustrate the ways in which the European Wild Man figure was reworked into something very new in America.

The first comes from German writer Friedrich Gerstäcker, who traveled throughout frontier America in the late 1830s and early 1840s and wrote up fictionalized accounts of his travels. In 1864, some of his stories were published in English under the title Western

Land and Western Water. One of these stories, “The Wild Man of the Woods,” recounts the reaction of backwoods Arkansas men to the arrival of a menagerie that included a chimpanzee. Upon seeing the chimpanzee, one of the backwoodsman proclaims, “'By this and by that, if it isn't a wild man!'” Before the menagerie owner could reply, another backwoodsman states, “He was caught down there in the Cash swamps. Prince was after him twice, but couldn't come up with him.'”63 Gerstäcker then interjects into the narrative, writing,

It is, certainly, a peculiar circumstance, that the rumor of "wild men" — that is, of men who have turned wild, who then rush into the forests, and cannot be removed from them — should exist in the Western Forests, in spite of the fact that seldom, or never, such a thing comes to light... one hunter or the other declares he has found the trail of a wild man, and traced him to his home in some cave or hollow tree on the mountains…. A

63 Frederick Wilhelm Christian Gerstacker, Western Lands and Western Waters (London: S.O. Beeton, 1864), 244.

87 report may appear as incredible and absurd as you will, but there is always some foundation of truth for it; and there have, in reality, been wild men, not only in Arkansas, but in many other countries. It is a remarkable fact that men, if lost for any length of time in the forest, are entirely deprived of their reason by fear and excitement; and finally, when found by others, instead of rejoicing at their salvation, leap into the nearest thicket, and try to escape man as their most dangerous foe.64

The story continues and eventually the drunken backwoodsmen force the chimpanzee to fight a mountain lion, resulting in the latter killing the former only to be lynched by the backwoodsmen for the crime. The next day, a young lawyer, in order to obtain some kind of compensation for the proprietor of the menagerie, informs one of the backwoodsmen that,

a wild man is not a beast that is clear. And if a wretched human being goes wild in the forest, humanity and our duty as Christians, bid us take care of him and preserve him from injury. But if we hound wild beasts on him, against which he has not any arms to defend himself, that is a very bad affair, and a just jury must bring it in murder.65

Luckily for the backwoodsman, after a sufficient payment the menagerie owner did not bring any murder charges against him.

While Gerstäcker's story of the Wild Man is a farce, his description of “truth” behind the backwoods foolishness is a near perfect description of the most common

American interpretation of the Wild Man as a lost white person. Gerstäcker's story shows that such Wild Men were sufficiently prominent that a German traveler could become intimately familiar with them in a six year sojourn. The Wild Man figure which

Gerstäcker describes is not merely a regurgitation of an European Wild Man story, which given the prominence of Wild Men in German culture he was likely to be familiar, but

64 Ibid., 250.

65 Ibid., 263.

88 rather one particular to America. Gerstäcker comments that while backwoodsmen may have been foolish to think a monkey is a Wild Man, the experience of being lost in the woods can drive a man wild. Gerstäcker's fictive lawyers hits upon this theme by arguing that the community has a duty to care for anyone who suffers the misfortune of going wild. What made this Wild Man story an American one is not the western setting but the articulation of the idea that anyone who inhabits wild lands could themselves become wild.

These same concerns are apparent in an 1853 novel by nativist historian and future mayor of Atlantic City David W. Belisle.66 His novel, The American Family

Robinson or the Adventures of a family lost in the great desert of the West, tells the story of an American family that, by staying together, survives both hostile Indians and a desolate environment on their journey to Oregon. During their journey, the family encounters a Wild Man and promptly sets about capturing him. After lassoing the creature, the family examines his body and confirms that he is Wild Man:

They now had a chance to examine the powerful creature at leisure. He was entirely naked, with a perfect human form and face, but was perfectly covered with hair, except the forehead, eyelids, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. They were surprised to see that the skin, where it was protected from the sun by the hair, was white and fair as their own. He was powerfully built, full six feet high, and uttered no sound that approached the pronunciation of words; a succession of snarls, growls, and yells, were all the sounds he uttered, and these approached, when accompanied by his efforts to release himself, the terrific, nearer than anything they had ever heard.67

66 Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 105.

67 D. W. Belisle, The American Family Robinson; Or, The Adventures of a Family Lost in the Great Desert of the West (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1853), 207.

89

The old trapper who accompanies the family informs them that the Wild Man is not an

Orang-Outang or monkey, but rather:

He is a human being like ourselves; probably has been lost in infancy, and grown up wild, without doubt, never having seen his kind before to-day... He is no more nor less than a wild man whose long exposure to the elements, and total isolation from every human being, has caused the hair to grow over his body. This also explains why he cannot speak like us.68

The Wild Man does not advance the novel's plot, since the day after the family captures him he escapes, never to appear or be mentioned again. Rather, the Wild Man serves to draw a distinction between the Robinsons, who by maintaining their family are able to retain their humanity in the wilderness of the newly acquired territory, and the isolated

Wild Man, who in the same environment surrenders to its transformative powers.

These two stories are particular to America because they are not about encountering some strange Wild Men but are rather about the possibility that anyone could, if exposed to the power of the natural world, become a Wild Man. The old trapper warns the Robinson family that the Wild Man they caught was a person like themselves.

In Europe, the Wild Man was an embodiment of what Europeans were not; in America, the Wild Man embodied what they could become. The Wild Man figure was a warning, an embodiment of the power of nature over human life, and the fragility of human society and the human condition. To understand this difference we must look more closely at how Americans understand their relationship with the natural world and the ways in which it affected their bodies. Nineteenth-century Americans were environmentalists and they believed that the external environment could impact the internal self. This belief was

68 Ibid., 208-209.

90 not confined to the western traveler or backwoodsman described in these works of fiction, nor to a community of struggling Texans. Indeed, it was a guiding principle of

American medicine, one that was put to the test in 1856 when the leading physicians of

Cincinnati took on a Wild Woman as a patient.

91

CHAPTER THREE:

Wild Woman of the Wachita and the Wild Man of Tennessee:

Medicine and Environmentalism.

The American belief in Wild Men was dependent on environmentalism, the idea that the external environment could impact the human body and human nature. Perhaps more than any other aspect of American society and culture, antebellum medicine in

America was based upon environmentalist interpretations of the human body. Americans believed that a landscape with unhealthy airs or waters could produce a sickly body, while a healthy place would result in a healthy body. Likewise, they believed that wild lands could result in wild bodies.

Two encounters between Wild People and physicians serve to illustrate the relationship between environmentalism, medicine, and the American belief in Wild Men.

In 1856, the Cincinnati probate court called upon the city’s physicians to determine if the

Wild Woman of the Wachita was wild, insane or a fraud. Instead, guided by environmental medicine, they could only definitively conclude that she did not have a wild body. Two decades later, the physicians of Louisville examined the Wild Man of

Tennessee and saw on his body the signs of a known disease. This encounter prefigured profound changes that would take place in American medicine, including the rejection of medical specificity and environmentalism for more universal categories of disease and

92 the embrace of germ theory. These developments would eventually serve to undermine the environmentalist explanations of human nature and thus set the stage for the eventual reshaping of the Wild Man figure in America.

Environmentalism in antebellum American thought

For most antebellum Americans, physicians and non-physicians alike, sickness or health were the product of the encounter between the body of the individual and the environment. Anything that interacted with the body—air, food, drink, any type of stimuli—could unbalance the body. The treatments employed by orthodox physicians worked by readjusting the system, and the evidence of effectiveness was their ability to produce observable changes to the body such as different rates of pulse, sweating, or vomiting. Throughout the nation, but even more pronouncedly in the west and south, physicians believed that impacts on health were highly localized and that a physician's expert experience was necessary to understand the interactions between particular bodies and particular environments.1

This tradition of environmentalism, the belief that the environment could shape the human body and human nature, was a lasting strain of Euro-American culture and thought. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European and American intellectuals believed that a region’s climate and environment determined the

1 Charles E. Rosenberg, The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 40-42, 54-58 and 159-161. John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 32 and 50.

93 characteristics of those who dwelt there. A people's race, temperament, health and intellect were thought to be produced by the climate and landscape they inhabited.2

In fact, some historians have argued that persistent worries about the environment caused many Europeans and early Euro-Americans to question the possibility of transplanting and sustaining their culture and bodies in the New World.3 The best-known example of American environmentalism can be found in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on

Virginia. Here, Jefferson attempted to refute the argument of Count Buffon and the Abbe

Raynal that the American continent produced only smaller and more degenerate animals.

However, Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia was not the only manifestation of concern regarding the American environment’s degenerative effects.4 Swedish naturalist Peter

Kalm argued that the American environment resulted in a physically and mentality inferior population, as did the Dutchman Cornelius de Pauw.5 In early nineteenth-century

France, acclimatization, or the transformation of organisms in an alien environment, was a vibrant field of study.6 Revolutionary leader and physician Benjamin Rush believed that climate shaped human nature. The logic that a wilderness experience could reshape the

2 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, translated by Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1973). Karen O. Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., Vol. 41 No. 2 (April 1984): 213-240.

3 John Canup, Out of the Wilderness, The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 3-7.

4 Dwight Boehem and Edward Schwartz, “Jefferson and the Theory of Degeneracy,” American Quarterly Vol. 9 No. 4. (Winter 1957): 448-453. Nancy Stepan, “Biological Degeneration, Races and Proper Places,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by Edward Chamberlain and Sanders L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

5 Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 91 No. 1 (February 25, 1947): 27-57.

6 Warwick Anderson, “Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-Century France and England,” Victorian Studies Vol. 35 No. 2 (Winter 1992): 135-157.

94 body was so strong that Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly illustrated the front piece of his

1770 edition of the Mary Rowlandson captivity narrative with a depiction of a hairy woman.7 In 1787, the Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith, a leading Presbyterian minister and president of The College of New Jersey, wrote that the difference between people stemmed from environmental factors like climate, state of society and habit of living.8 All eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century environmentalism was grounded in an understanding of human nature and the human body as malleable to environmental influences.

One of the best examples of the malleability of the human body in environmentalist thought is one of the earliest Wild Man stories from the Americas. The story appears in the work of Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega, who published it in

1609 in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas. In this work, de la Vega tells the story of

Pedro Luis Serrano. Serrano was a Spanish sailor whose ship went down in the sea between Nicaragua and Jamaica in the sixteenth century and only he, among all the ship’s sailors, was able to reach a tiny desert island that lay nearby. There he lived upon rainwater and turtles until, “owing to the harshness of the climate, hair grew over his entire body to such a thickness that they came to resemble an animal's fur, and not just any animal's but that of a wild boar.” Then one day another ship sank off the island and another man was able to swim to safety on the shore. This sailor, seeing Serrano covered

7 Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston: printed and sold by Nathaniel Coverly, in Black- Horse Lane, North End MDCCLXX, Reilly 1092, 1770). Mary E. Fissell, “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in "Aristotle's Masterpiece,” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series Vol. 60 No. 1 (January, 2003): 43- 74.

8 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 286 and 486-488.

95 in fur, thought he was a demon. Eventually, the second sailor realized that Serrano was a

Christian man and so they lived together on their island until the second sailor grew fur just like the first. After many years, another ship appeared and took them back to Europe.

While Serrano’s companion soon died on the journey, Serrano himself traveled through

Germany showing off his body fur. Eventually he reached the Emperor, who granted him a reward of a considerable income in Peru. However, on his way back to the New World,

Serrano died.9 Although Serrano is not called a Wild Man, nor does Serrano act in a particularly wild manner, the story illustrates the belief that isolation in the wilderness would reshape the human body in ways which both facilitated survival in the wild environment and marked the individual as having led a wild life.

Americans understood the environment as affecting not only people but also animals. Indeed, discussion of the ways in which the environment could reshape animal bodies was common in nineteenth-century agricultural journals’ discussions of animal breeding. During the 1790s, agricultural journals argued that feral and domestic livestock had different bodies as a result of climate and other environmental conditions.10 While agricultural journals and societies advocated that farmers should obtain improved livestock, they cautioned that, just as the improvement of a breed was possible, so too was its degeneration in response to the environment. As The Agriculturist proclaimed in

1840, “[a]ll things in Nature are destructible, there is nothing permanent. Animate and

9 Garcilaso de La Vega El Inca, “The Story of Pedro Serrano,” in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39-43.

10 “Changes produced in Animals by Domestication," The Rural Magazine; or, Vermont Repository (November 1796): 2-11.

96 inanimate nature, like the moon, is constantly changing, this will apply to the breeding of domestic animals.”11

American farmers knew that domestic livestock that escaped the farm quickly took on wild characteristics. In 1882, The Rural Record: A Journal for the Farm,

Plantation and Fire Side, published in Chattanooga, cautioned its readers about the tendency of hogs to change in response to their environment: “A hog in a single generation changes in form, color and habit from the sait and quiet porker to the fleet and fierce wild boar. One imported boar is told of that changed immediately after escaping from a ranch, and become as wild and fleet as a deer, with a thin body and arched back, and legs that appeared much longer.”12 The Southern Farmer likewise informed readers that while hogs provided with a comfortable and sheltered life grew gentle, smooth and large, hogs that were neglected and allowed to roam about became “long legged, short bodied, long nosed, heavy eared, thin, gaunt, pinched, unsightly, ill shaped, savage and unprofitable.”13 A wild environment produced wild animal bodies.

Dr. M. G. Ellzey, a physician and eventual member of the Virginia Tech faculty, wrote a series of articles for The Southern Planter and Farmer in the 1870s and 1880s on animal breeding. In several articles Ellzey argued that exposure to harsh conditions or climates would cause an improved breed of livestock to “degenerate or revert” into their wild or primitive condition. He also argued that feral livestock reverted to their original

11 John Selby and Tolbert Fanning, The Agriculturalist (February 1840): 39.

12 The Rural Record, A Journal for Farm, Plantation and Fire Side (1882): 1.

13 The Southern Farmer Vol. 5 No. 7 (July 1871): 273. George Ethelbert Walsh, “STOCK-RAISING IN THE SOUTH,” The Independent Vol. 46 (Nov 15, 1894): 31.

97 form.14 In the changes that took place in domestic animals as they went feral, Americans had powerful examples of the ways in which nature could reshape bodies. As the president of the Tennessee Agriculture Society said before entering into a discussion of the breeding of horses littered with comparisons to human beings, in the eyes of the southern farmer, “All nature is very much alike.”15 If animal bodies could become wild, so too could human bodies. Combined with an intellectual tradition that held that the environment could affect the human body, Americans had good reason to be wary of settlement in wild lands.

Determining the impact of the environment, particularity upon human health, in the newly settled western territories was a central preoccupation of both physicians and laymen. These Americans understood the illness they experienced while engaging in the settlement of new lands as resulting from the action of these new lands upon the human body. Physicians mapped out healthy and unhealthy landscapes and attempted to work out the influence of particular waters, winds and climate on human health. Farmers, physicians, politicians and others debated the impact of clearing fields, planting crops, reshaping waterways and irrigating fields upon human health. All agreed, however, that the body was porous and permeable to the external environment. Diseases that we might identify as malaria, yellow fever, or cholera were instead thought to result from unhealthy aspects of the environment, changes in the land from settlement or the process of the human body’s acclimatization to a new place. Successful settlement depended on both

14 M. G. Ellzoy, “LIVE STOCK DEPARTMENT,” Southern Planter and Farmer Vol. 37 No. 7 (July 1876): 502 Southern Planter and Farmer Vol. 41 No. 9 (September 1880): 285-287. Southern Planter and Farmer Vol. 41 No. 10 (October 1880): 343. Southern Planter and Farmer Vol. 42 No. 5 (May 1881): 271.

15 John Shelby, “Philosophy of Breeding Domestic Animals,” The Agriculturalist (November 1840): 252.

98 the ability of bodies to adapt to new lands and to reshape the landscapes in ways that promoted health. Thus the pattern of western settlement and the experience of that settlement by individuals was guided by a conviction that the environment acted upon the human body.16

Perhaps no figure better embodied the environmental bent of antebellum medicine than Dr. Daniel Drake, and certainly no physician was more important to the Ohio River

Valley medical community. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania

Medical School in Philadelphia, he headed west to Cincinnati. He founded the Medical

College of Ohio in 1819 and the medical department of Cincinnati College in 1835. He also taught at the medical schools in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky. Deeply invested in the region's civic community, Drake served as president or as an important officer for several Cincinnati institutions such as the Western Museum, Humane Society,

United States Branch Bank, Cincinnati Library Society, and the Standing Committee of the Cincinnati Society for Promotion of Agriculture. He collaborated with William Henry

Harrison to build the Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum. Founding and editing

The Western Medical and Physical Journal and helping to establish the Ohio State

Medical Society, Drake was key to the building of the region’s medical history. He wrote several works of history and medicine, the most import being his massive Systematic

Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America, which was

16 Linda Lorraine Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 5, 18, 24, and 40. Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 2-6, 25, 53-55, 86 and 214. Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History (April 2005), 193-195.

99 one of the earliest and most complete medical geographies.17 Drake's medical writings

were some of the best examples of antebellum medicine's interest in race, health and

environment. More than just an atlas of diseases found within the region, Drake's

Systematic Treatise considered all the elements that contributed to the health of that

region’s peoples: food, clothing, climate, and occupations. He believed that intermarriage

between different European races, combined with climatic, culinary, and social

influences, would amalgamate emigrants in a new western race.18

Perhaps the most remarkable example of Drake’s environmentalism comes from a

letter he wrote to The Western Lancet while conducting research for his Systematic

Treatise. While visiting the hot springs of western Virginia, Drake encountered a “horde”

of twenty to thirty individuals whom he called the Hinkleities after their family name.

The family originated in New York but had come to the mountains of Virginia some

thirty years earlier and joined another family residing in a mountain cave. Drake saw

these people as completely degenerate beings lacking all elements of society and

spending their days wandering around the mountains. More interestingly, Drake believed

that the Hickleities’ lifestyle and environment had reshaped their physiology. The family

was “rather more exposed to the inclemencies than the most destitute of our Indian tribes

and afford a striking example of the adaptation of the physiology of the white man to that

which seems the natural inheritance of the red.” The result was that the family was

“inured” to the “exposures” of the “rain and cold.” That such changes to the Hickleities

17 Mitman, 194. Daniel Drake, Henry D. Shapiro, and Zane L. Miller, Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science & Society (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970).

18 Drake, Systematic Treatise, 644- 650. Valencius, 246. Michael Dorn, “(In)temperate Zones: Daniel Drake's Medico-moral Geographies of Urban Life in the Trans-Appalachian American West,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Vol. 55 No. 3 (2000): 256-91.

100 resulted from their wild life was no surprise to Drake, for he believed, “As a race, we

Anglo-Saxons may justly feel proud of the Hinkleism; as it shows that while we can rise higher on the scale of civilization and enterprise than any other people, we can also sink lower. To us all heights and depths are equally accessible.”19 Like Pedro Serrano or the feral livestock of American agricultural journals, the Hickleities were a remarkable example of the malleability of bodies to the environment. Inhabiting the wild mountains of Virginia, exposed to all the raw and wild elements, the Hickleities had become a wild people with wild bodies. But they were not the only wild bodies that the medical community of Cincinnati would seek to explain, for six years later a supposed Wild

Woman made an appearance in the city.

The Wild Woman of the Wachita comes to town

In May of 1856, Captain J. W. C. Northecote brought the Wild Woman of the

Wachita to Cincinnati, the Queen City of the West. There, he undertook what he described as a “great philanthropic effort” to “civilize and educate her” by

“EXHIBITING HER, FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY, AT NO. 55 WEST FIFTH

STREET.”20 From nine in the morning until ten at night, the Wild Woman was visible to the public gaze for fifteen cents.21

What made the Wild Woman fit for the public gaze was the story that Northecote told of her origins and his attempts to capture her. According to Northecote, he first saw the Wild Woman the previous year while hunting for gold in the Wachita Mountains near

19 Daniel Drake, “Communication from Dr. Drake to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Cincinnati,” Western. Lancet Vol. 11 (1850), 557-69.

20 Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 17, 1856.

21 Cincinnati Daily Times, July 5, 1856. Cincinnati Daily Times, July 10, 1856.

101 the Red River in what is now Oklahoma. One night, while it was his turn to watch over the camp, Northecote saw a figure approaching the camp. Fearing it was a Comanche,

Northecote lay flat on the ground. As it came closer, “he saw by the moonlight that it was no Indian, but a young white woman dressed in a robe of skins.”22 Northecote told his companions of the young woman, but none believed him. Unable to forget her, the following winter, Northecote enlisted “half a dozen hearty fellows to accompany him and set forth on a trip to the Wachita Mountains, on a hunt after the wild woman.”23

Capturing the Wild Woman was not easy. The journey back to the Wachita region proved so difficult that all but one of his companions abandoned the quest. Finally, in early March of 1856, Northecote reached the spot where he first saw the Wild Woman.

Searching a nearby thicket, he found a small cave among the rocks, which he believed was her den. For two days and two nights, he watched the mouth of the cavern, until finally the Wild Woman appeared. Northecote set his dogs upon her and then ran after her himself. She turned back towards him and he threw a lasso in her direction, catching her around the neck. Northecote held the noose firmly as the Wild Woman struggled to escape, but her efforts only succeeded in tightening the rope more firmly around her neck. The Wild Woman collapsed and Northecote set about binding her entire body with rope. Leashing her with a rope around her waist, the end of which he held in his hand,

Northecote marched the Wild Woman three hundred miles to the nearest settlement,

Grayson County, Texas. There he had a carriage rebuilt into a kind of cage with which to transport her the remaining distance until he could load her onto a steamboat. For the first

22 Cincinnati Commercial, quoted in Geneva Express, June 14, 1856.

23 Ibid.

102 five days of the journey, the Wild Woman refused to eat. Finally giving into hunger, she ate, but only unprepared foods. By the time she reached Cincinnati in May of 1856, having been exhibited first in the city of Little Rock, she was willing to eat anything that was not very salty or very sweet.24

Speaking to newspaper reporters upon his arrival in Cincinnati, Northecote proclaimed that “[h]is great object now was to civilize her, to learn her to talk, and to hear her story.” Northecote denied any intention of earning money from his exhibition of the Wild Woman, telling the reporter “he will only take money from visitors that he may use it for her benefit.”25 From late May until July 9, 1856, Northecote entertained spectators with the Wild Woman's body while newspapers like the Cincinnati

Commercial vouched both for the authenticity of the Wild Woman and Northecote's charity. When a reporter from the Cincinnati Daily Times paid a visit, he was at first

“inclined to consider this exhibition a humbug” but, “after investigation, we are of a different opinion.” According to the reporter, “her appearance, from the first moment that the eye rests on her, is, to one and all acquainted with the actions of a wild animal, sufficient to convince anyone that the story of her capture is true,” adding, “We advise the curious to call and see her.”26 For over a month the curious did come, to stare at a woman with long hair, strange eyes and a leather strap tied around her waist, and to listen to

Northecote tell of his daring efforts to hunt her down and return her to civilization.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Cincinnati Daily Times, June 26, 1856, 3.

103 The civilization to which Northecote brought the Wild Woman, Cincinnati, was

still one of the chief commercial and cultural centers of the American west in 1856, but it

was in the midst of some significant changes. By the late 1850s, industry had replaced

commerce as the city’s economic engine. Cincinnati was among the largest producers of

cloth in America and it was a leader in the processing of agricultural commodities,

primarily pork products and alcohol. Germans and other immigrants flocked to the city to

work in these industries. While Cincinnati's growth had been founded on the shipment of

agricultural products from the Ohio River Valley downriver for export at New Orleans,

the movement of goods by railroad to eastern markets gradually replaced this trade. The

city's civic vitality and boosterism, which in earlier decades was responsible for building

the cultural institutions that earned it the title the “London of the west,” declined in these

later years. Conversely, the municipal government became more important in managing

the increasingly diverse and fractured city population. Cincinnati in 1856 was not a city

in decline, but its future was not as bright as it once imagined.27

This decline in civic culture, and the fragmentation of Cincinnati society as a

result of wide-scale immigration and economic diversification, can perhaps explain why

there was little interest in or concern about the exhibition of the Wild Woman from either

the city elite or the civil authorities for some time. It was not until early July that a

community group did take notice, the ladies of Walnut Hill. While these women, from

one of the more prosperous neighborhoods, normally ignored the sordid doings of the

27 Charles R. Wilson, “Cincinnati a Southern Outpost in 1860-1861,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 24 No. 4 (Mar., 1938): 473-482. Carl Abbott, “Three Middle Western Cities in the Antebellum Decade Popular Economic Thought and Occupational Structure,” Journal of Urban History (1975): 175-187. Charles Cist, Sketches and Statistics of Cincinnati in 1851 (Cincinnati: W.H. Moore & Co, 1851). John D. Fairfield, “Democracy in Cincinnati: Civic Virtue and Three Generations of Urban Historians,” Urban History Vol. 24 (1997): 200-220.

104 Germans and other so-called undesirables downtown, they felt compelled to take action upon learning that a white woman was being exposed to the gaze of anyone with fifteen cents to spare. They requested that Judge John Burgoyne of the Probate Court undertake an investigation as they suspected the Wild Woman was merely insane and that Captain

Northecote, if that really was his name, was exploiting her.28

On July 9, 1856, Judge Burgoyne issued a warrant and ordered two sheriffs to arrest the Wild Woman so that he might hold a lunacy inquest in compliance with the new state statute regarding the insane. The sheriffs went to the room in which she was exhibited and took the Wild Woman into custody, along with the woman employed to care for her, Ann Walters. Captain Northecote, however, was absent. The sheriffs brought the Wild Woman before the judge, who ordered her to be held in prison until the court could subpoena witnesses and bring physicians to testify on her “alleged condition.”29 As the sheriffs returned the Wild Woman to jail, a man approached her too closely and she grabbed him by the beard, nearly yanking it out. Once in jail, the Wild Woman stood in the corner of her cell with a leather rope tied around her waist. Staring vacantly around the room, she projected “extreme fear” and when a reporter attempted to approach, she backed away further into the room’s corner.30

At nine in the morning the next day, the sheriff brought the Wild Woman back to court, accompanied by a female attendant who held the leather strap around her waist.

28 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 10, 1856, 1.

29 Ohio General Assembly, AN ACT To provide for the uniform government and better regulation of the Lunatic Asylums of the State and the care of Idiots and the Insane. Legislative acts passed and joint resolutions adopted by the General Assembly Ohio (Secretary of State, April 1856), 81-96. 30 Cincinnati Daily Times, July 10, 1856, 1. Cincinnati Enquirer, July 10, 1856, 1.

105 The Wild Woman stood with her back to the courthouse wall, and to one reporter “the only evidence she gave to being distraught was the wild and rapid dilation of her eyes, and timidity which caused her to shrink upon the approach of strangers.” As the court waited for the witnesses and physicians to arrive, the spectators sat and wondered, “Was she a Wild Woman, a maniac, or an actor?”31

The Wild Woman of the Wachita did not resemble a classic Wild Woman. She was not covered in hair. She was largely mute, though she spoke some words on a few occasions. According to Ann Walters, her caretaker, she could jump to great heights in order to pick apples from a tree. But otherwise she lacked the physical power of a traditional Wild Woman. Those who looked upon her saw a “pretty but not handsome” white woman with thick black hair and a melancholy expression. She acted fearful, timid, or strange, but not particularly wild. What made her a Wild Woman were the stories that

Captain Northecote told about her, her capture in the Wachita Mountains, her clothing of skins, and reports of her wild behavior before the taming influence of civilization had its effect.

Each member of the community who saw the Wild Woman took part in shaping her public identity. Some community members participated in her exhibition, such as the spectators who paid Northecote in order to gaze upon her and the newspapermen who promoted the show. Some accepted Northecote's image and saw her as a Wild Woman fit for the public gaze. Others saw her as a humbug or fiction created for commercial purposes. Perhaps they enjoyed examining the Wild Woman, trying to determine the veracity of Northecote's story and engaging in the antebellum game of popular expertise

31 Ibid.

106 that made Barnum an embodiment of the area.32 The ladies of Walnut Hill created a very different identify for the Wild Woman upon seeing her and hearing her story. For them she was a victim, a poor insane woman exploited by scoundrels.

For Judge Burgoyne, and the physicians he brought to his court to examine the

Wild Woman, she was an object to be illuminated by their reason and expertise. The physicians would examine her body and the judge would question them and other witnesses and make a definitive determination as to her status. Subject to the combined expertise of the legal and medical systems, the mystery of the Wild Woman would be solved. The judge and physicians were in some ways ill-equipped to resolve the question of the Wild Woman's identity. While the only question that a probate court could answer was if she were sane, they were drawn again to the question posed by the community:

“Was she a Wild Woman, a maniac, or an actor?”

Around ten on the morning of July 10, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone but the witnesses and the court reporter and began the investigation. The proceedings of the trial of the Wild Woman consisted of two parts. The first was the testimony of Ann Walters, the woman whom Northecote had employed to care for the

Wild Woman. Judge Burgoyne had also subpoenaed Northecote but he had fled the state, so Walters was the only person available to testify to the Wild Woman narrative. The judge asked Walters to tell what she knew of the Wild Woman and of Northecote.

Walters repeated Northecote's story, though she added that he had learned of the Wild

Woman several years ago from Indians. The judges pressed her on details of Northecote's story, asking how the woman was captured, where she lived, what types of clothes she

32 Neil Harris, Humbug; The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). 107 wore and whether she had any tools. The judge’s line of inquiry expressed more interest in determining the truth of the narrative of the Wild Woman than in her current state of mental health.33

The judge then began to ask Walters about her own experiences with the Wild

Woman. Walters informed the judge that Northecote had brought the Wild Woman to her home in Mason County, Texas dressed in skins “and said he was going to travel with her to civilize her.” Northecote promised Walters the considerable sum of fifty dollars a month to care for the Wild Woman, money that she never received. Walters herself seemed conflicted regarding the veracity of the narrative of the Wild Woman. She described the Wild Woman as acting like a monkey and other animals in both her movement and her eating. She variously suggested that the Wild Woman might have been an escaped captive of the Comanche who had a child with one of them and that both

Northecote and the Wild Woman were frauds who spoke to each other in low tones.34

While Walters was testifying, the second part of the inquest began when the group of physicians began to attempt their examination of the Wild Woman.

Like the city itself, the practice of medicine in Cincinnati was in the midst of profound changes during the 1850s. With its medical school and hospitals, Cincinnati was perhaps the leading center of medical knowledge in the West. But the orthodox medical community, of which most physicians who examined the Wild Woman were members, was under pressure from a number of different directions. Cincinnati was home

33 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 11, 1856, 1. Cincinnati Daily Times, July 10, 1856, 3. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, July 11, 1856, 1.

34 Cincinnati Columbia, July 11, 1856. Cincinnati Daily Times, July 10, 1856, 3.

108 not only to an orthodox medical school but two other alternative medical schools, an eclectic school of medicine—which combined a variety of alternative and some orthodox practices—and a botanical school—which used plant extracts rather than chemicals as medicine. These alternative practitioners gained considerable popularity because they employed far fewer of the heroic treatments, such as bleeding and chemical purges, favored by orthodox physicians. Physicians during these years also faced heavy criticism for relying heavily on theory and lacking an empirical grounding for their treatments. In response to these pressures, physicians moderated their treatments, particularly bleedings.

Yet despite the changes in treatment, American doctors, and most especially those in the west, continued to understand health in much the same way as before, as a product of the body's constant dynamic interaction with its environment.35

Daniel Drake passed away in the fall of 1852 and thus was not among the physicians who examined the Wild Woman. But it is likely that he had trained several of them and that they had all read the medical journal he edited or the great medical texts that he wrote. The physicians who attended the examination of the Wild Woman were

Drake’s intellectual heirs, for they believed that if the narrative of the Wild Woman was true, her wild life in the wilderness would reshape her body just as it had the Hinkleities.

The physicians in Judge Burgoyne’s courtroom began their examination of the

Wild Woman’s body by attempting to undress her. She resisted and in the struggle one of her breasts was exposed, causing one physician to exclaim, “She has been a mother and has nursed.”36 For these physicians, the truth of the Wild Woman lay not in the verbal

35 Rosenberg, 40-42, 54-58, and 159-161. Warner, 32 and 50.

36 Cincinnati Columbia, July 11, 1856, 1. Cincinnati Daily Times, July 10, 1856, 3. 109 narrative told about her but in their expert examination of her body. To facilitate that examination and literally silence the struggling Wild Woman, two physicians “forced her down upon the table” while a third administered the ether to the Wild Woman, who was now “screaming violently.” Before the ether took effect, the Wild Woman gave a “very audible... Oh my.” With the Wild Woman unconscious, the physicians began what the

Daily Times reporter called the “grossest imposition of the day,” a detailed examination of the Wild Woman's body.37

From their examination of her unconscious body, the physicians determined that she was familiar to civilization. Not only had she given birth and nursed, but she also had the signs of medical treatment. On her left arm were vaccination marks, while both arms showed evidence of regular bleedings and other medical treatments. Finally, her ears had been pierced. But her body also showed that she had suffered from violence. One of the piercing holes was torn as if someone had ripped an earring from her head, and her chest, body and head were covered in scars up to an inch long. Yet the truth of her unconscious body could not speak to the issue of her insanity, only her exposure to civilization and therefore her lack of true wildness.

After the physicians finished their examination, they went before the judge to give their opinion as to the mental state of the Wild Woman. While the physicians testified to their opinion regarding her sanity, much of what they said related to the question of her wildness, or the distinction between insanity and true wildness. Dr. M. B. Wright, a one-

37 Ibid.

110 time rival of Drake’s at the Ohio College of Medicine, was the first physician to speak.38

He stated, “In a word, it is clear, that once, at any rate, she was not a 'wild woman.' The

fact that she was found in the woods was no evidence that she was not insane; and if the

proof should be that she was taken in the woods by her captor, the question would still be

whether she escaped under the influence of insanity.” Dr. Murphy believed “as to the

story told that she was a 'wild woman,' it was in his mind the sheerest humbug.” Others

likewise argued that the Wild Woman could not have been wild due to the evidence of

her body and that the story of her capture was the “sheerest invention.” Some sought to

reconcile her wild story and her body. Dr. Hiram Cox, who trained with Drake at the

Ohio Medical College but later became a professor of eclectic medicine,39 thought she

was insane but believed, “if she was found in the woods, it is possible she had been taken

by the Indians...had a child and lost it, and the condition in which we see her ensued.” Dr.

Menzies also thought her insane but believed it could have resulted from her being

“violated by Indians.” The rest of the physicians believed that she was either a fraud or

insane as the result of childbirth or the loss of a child. Thus while the physicians were

brought before the court to testify to the Wild Woman’s sanity, they could not answer

that question without evaluating her wildness and the truth of her narrative. They could

not understand her condition without understanding the life she had led and the

environments she inhabited, all of which would be marked on her body.40

38 A.G Drury, “Biographical sketch of M.D. Wright,” The Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic New Series Vol. III (1879): 311-317.

39 Harvey Wickes Felter, “Hiram Cox,” Eclectic Medical Journal Vol. 69 (1909): 584-586.

40 Cincinnati Columbian, July 11, 1856. Cincinnati Daily Times, July 10, 1856, 3. Cincinnati Gazette, July 11, 1856, 1. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 11, 1856, 1.

111 In the world of early nineteenth-century medicine, insanity was a disease like any other, a product of the interactions between the body and the environment. The nervous system joined the mind to the body, and the under-or over-stimulation of these nerve tissues was understood to result in impairment of the brain's functioning. The nervous system could be impacted in a number of ways. Guided by holistic interpretations of human health, physicians believed that a problem in any system or organ of the human body could impact nerve tissues and thus the brain. But strong emotions or other types of mental disturbances could also affect the brain. Thus insanity was a disease that stemmed from both physical and mental causes and any type of external stimulation could disturb the nervous system and thus bring about insanity. Any of the events that the physicians theorized that the Wild Woman had experienced—the birth of a child, the loss of that child, being taken captive by Indians or merely being lost in the woods—could result in insanity using that logic.41

The next day, having delayed in the hope that Northecote could be brought before him, the judge issued his ruling. According to the Daily Enquirer, “The court remarked that it was scarcely necessary to pursue the investigation. Although this whole matter might be a humbug, he would not at present dismiss this “wild woman,” but would send her to the Lunatic Asylum.”42 Like the physicians who struggled to separate their evaluation of the Wild Woman’s sanity from their assessment of the veracity of her narrative, the judge was able to make a ruling but not a judgment. The judge both

41 Gerald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-194 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 33-38. Lynn Gamwell, and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).

42 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 11, 1856, 1.

112 dismissed the necessity of the investigation and also admitted that his trial was unable to uncover the truth of the matter. Thus he deferred, sending the Wild Woman to the asylum in the hopes that there the truth would be revealed.

After trial, the popular opinion regarding the Wild Woman's nature remained divided. According to the Gazette, “While a few still cling to the original hypothesis respecting her wildness, nearly everybody is of the opinion that she and the “Captain” are unmitigated humbugs. Others adopt a sort of compromise view, and contend that the woman was driven insane by some severe shock, possibly the killing of her husband and children by the Indians, and while in this condition took to the woods, and was discovered by the “captain.”43

For the next several days, the Wild Woman remained in the city jail while officials made arrangements for her to be sent to the state asylum in Dayton. During this time, the Wild Woman had several visitors, including a woman who mistakenly thought she might be her lost sister, and a reporter from the Daily Times. While the reporter talked to her caretaker, the Wild Woman stood in her cell playing with a doll. Walters stated that the Wild Woman was not nearly as wild as she had been prior to their arrival in Cincinnati, when for five weeks “she was kept in a cage like a tiger.” She also revealed that chloroform had helped calm the Wild Woman and that she believed the Wild Woman would be able to speak after three or four weeks in the asylum. The interview was interrupted at several points by visitors also wanting to get a look at the Wild Woman,

43 Cincinnati Daily Gazette, July 11, 1856.

113 including the wife of one of the officers of the court who said that “it would be a shame

for a sane woman to practice such wildness to make money.”44

Finally, on the morning of July 14, two deputy sheriffs took the Wild Woman out

of the city and brought her to the Dayton asylum. Institutionalized in the asylum, the

Wild Woman vanished from the public eye. Over the next several months, however,

stories regarding her subsequent fate made appearances in the local and national media.45

Near the end of the 1857 edition of the Western Lancet, a leading medical journal

published in Cincinnati, editor George Blackman considered the physicians who took part

in the examination of the Wild Woman the proceeding year. Blackman argued that the

Wild Woman was not insane but merely a fraud since it was clear upon examining her

body that she was not wild. He castigated the majority of the physicians who thought she

was insane, arguing that since the evidence indicated that she was not wild, she must be a

fraud. Blackman details the evidence of the Wild Woman act as being fraudulent,

mentioning Captain Northcote's disappearance, the improbability of the Wild Woman

constructing clothing out of hides and skin with only a knife, and the physical signs of

civilization on her body. According to Blackman, “From all this, who would not at once

declare, there is baseness and collusion, in showing her as wild.”46 Only after establishing

that the Wild Woman was not wild does the question of her insanity “follow as an

inquiry.” Blackman then argued that the Wild Woman's jerky behavior and wild eyes

44 Cincinnati Daily Times, July 11, 1856, 3. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 12, 1856, 1.

45 Cincinnati Daily Times, July 14, 1856. Due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L. 104-191), the asylum records are unavailable.

46 George Blackman, “Reviews and Notices: Medico-Legal examination of the case of Charles B. Huntington,” The Western Lancet Vol. 18 No. 3 (March, 1857), 218- 225.

114 were forced, not natural, and that her reaction to the chloroforming was an attempt to similitude the effect of anesthesia. Rhetorically, Blackman asked, “Would any man, with a due degree of experience in the detection of intellectual aberrations, pronounce the above individual insane? Did any one or all the symptoms justify such a conclusion?”47

Blackman's insistence that the physicians had not looked for specific symptoms to justify their diagnosis of insanity was an early example of the therapeutic revolution taking place in American medicine that would transform ill health from a systematic unbalance to groups of specific and isolated signs and symptoms of a particular disease.48

While this change in medical theory and practice took place slowly over the course of the mid nineteenth century, it would lead physicians away from highly specific environmentalist interpretations of health that saw an individual’s condition as the product of a particular body inhabiting a particular environment and engaging in particular activities which had helped make the belief in the Wild People possible.

The popular press continued to cover the Wild Woman as well. Rather than depicting her as a Wild Woman redeemed from nature, these new stories presented her as a fallen woman. One story from the Cincinnati Columbian claimed that the Wild Woman was from Texas and had suffered a great mental shock after finding out her husband was already married. Her relatives took her to the hot springs of Arkansas in order to recover in a healthy environment. While at the springs, she met Northecote and he proposed to her his scheme to exhibit her as a Wild Woman. She at first rejected him, but using some type of unstated intimidation Northecote was eventually able to get her to go along with

47 Ibid., 224-225.

48 Warner, 86-87.

115 his scheme. The story concluded by stating that she now intended to travel to Arkansas to find her children once her health fully recovered in the asylum.49 This was collaborated by another news report that said that, upon receiving a letter from her sister in Texas, she left the asylum to rejoin her sister and her children.50

However, there is much greater evidence for another news account of the Wild

Woman as a fallen woman. According to this report, the Wild Woman was Ann Eliza

Paul, the mistress of Northecote, whose real name was Joe Williams and was a carpenter from Shreveport, Louisiana. According to the Shreveport Gazette, Williams developed the scheme to portray Paul as a Wild Woman after receiving a bearskin from “Some gentlemen who went in search of the wild man last winter.” This seems to be a reference to the Gazette’s story of the encounter between the Wild Man of Arkansas and a group of hunters near the Red River earlier in the year.51 This story is corroborated somewhat by the 1850 census, which listed a thirty-two year old carpenter named Joe Williams living with an nineteen-year-old Anne Paul in Shreveport.52 Blackman, who had the most definite explanation of the Wild Woman’s fate, concurred that it was a scheme for making money, writing, “Gradually and cautiously, she gave evidence of a restoration to sound reason. Then came a full confession that the story of her capture was an invention; that her appearance of wildness and fear of man were assumed; that her scanty apparel

49 Cincinnati Columbian, in Daily Cleveland Herald, September 13, 1856.

50 Daily Cleveland Herald, January 22, 1857. “The Wild Woman Imposition,” Daily Cleveland Herald, September 13, 1856.

51 “The Wild Man Again,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1856, 1. “The Wild Woman Hoax,” Galveston News, August 2, 1856, 3.

52 Janesville Weekly Free Press, September 8, 1856. U. S. Census Bureau, Federal Census: Shreveport, Caddo Parish, Louisiana, November 3, 1850, Sheet No: 342A Page No: 682.

116 was designed to add to the effect; and that the whole was a scheme to make money.”53 It thus seems possible that Northecote and the Wild Woman were Williams and Paul.

In 1857, a final postscript to the Wild Woman appeared in the form of a melodramatic novel published by E.E. Barclay. Barclay, who moved between Cincinnati and Philadelphia, was a publisher of adventure and, most notably, sensational “true” crime novels and booklets.54 The novel was called The Wild Woman or the wrecked heart and purported to be the “True Autobiography of the 'Wild Woman' who was recently exhibited at Cincinnati, and was rescued from her persecutors by the citizens of that city, and sent to the insane asylum at Dayton Ohio.” Like all the later interpretations of the

Wild Woman, the Barclay book depicted her as a fallen woman. The novel begins with a narrator telling of his visit to the insane asylum, where he is shown the pitiful figure of the Wild Woman. The account showed familiarity with the Wild Woman's story, as the narrator states, “She was designated the "Wild "Woman," and was represented to have been captured in certain mountains, by one who had attempted an inhuman speculation on her madness. This is a hard world, and even the maniac is not secure from the merciless hands of the speculator.” The Wild Woman was mute, but the narrator is able to persuade her to write out her story. The narrative that follows is an almost unreadably melodramatic story of seduction, forgery and murder that results in Alice Galon, the future Wild Woman of the Wachita, going insane. Only after the conclusion of Galon's story does the original narrator return to state that, after going insane, Galon was

53 Blackman, 225.

54 Thomas M. McDade, “Lurid Literature of the Last Century: The Publications of E. E. Barclay,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 80, No. 4 (October, 1956): 452-464.

117 exhibited by her seducer and his new mistress. It appears that most of the work was copied from some other novel since it contains no mention of the particulars of the Wild

Woman in the body of the narration. It is only the narrator’s statement that this was the story of the Wild Woman that connects the main narrative to events in Cincinnati.

Nevertheless, the work was an important testament to the prominence of this single Wild

Woman story since the publisher believed that it would sell in Cincinnati.55

The case of the Wild Woman of the Wachita reveals how the existence of Wild

People was not at odds with mid nineteenth-century medical knowledge. The physical evidence of the Wild Woman's body may have established that she was not in fact wild, but as heirs to a millennium-old tradition of environmental medicine, the physicians of

Cincinnati could not dismiss the possibility that a woman raised outside of civilization might truly be wild. Indeed, the physicians who appeared before the Cincinnati probate court were better prepared to answer questions about wildness and the body than they were prepared to discuss sanity.

From Wild Man to Fish-Skin Man

Some twenty-two years later, the medical community examined another Wild

Person a hundred miles down the Ohio River in Louisville with much different results. In

1878, Dr. Broyler, a dentist from Sparta, Tennessee, brought the creature to the city and made arrangements with the owner of the Metropolitan Theater, John Whallen, to exhibit the creature around the country. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Wild Man appeared to be a normal but tall man from a distance. However, upon

55 Alice Galon, The Wild Woman, or, The Wrecked Heart: Being the True Autobiography of the "Wild Woman" Who Was Recently Exhibited at Cincinnati, and Was Rescued from Her Persecutors by the Citizens of That City, and Sent to the Insane Asylum at Dayton, Ohio, (Cincinnati: Barclay & Co, 1857). 118 closer examination he was covered in scales, which Broyler said he shed at intervals like a rattlesnake. His large eyes, webbed feet, and the fact that he required his skin to be damp exacerbated his reptilian appearance. Prior to his capture, the “Wild Man of the Woods” had roamed the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee for at least eighteen years and was the “constant terror of the community.” He lived on wild foods and was able to catch fish while swimming in the water.56

Broyler claimed that he had been attempting to capture the creature since the end of the Civil War. To this end, Broyler and his companions chased him through the mountains, hoping to tire him out. After driving the Wild Man to exhaustion,

Broyler entangled him in a net. Even then, the “wild man fought with his hands, after the fashion of a bear, and bruised and scratched the Doctor in a frightful manner.” Having captured the creature, Broyler telegraphed Whallen, who agreed to exhibit the creature and purchased “a third interest in the wonder.” Hoping to gain publicity and legitimacy for his exhibition, Whallen organized a special showing of the Wild Man for Louisville physicians. Several prominent physicians attended, including Dr. Cary Blackburn, who considered the Wild Man a “great curiosity.” Blackburn further stated that the Wild

Man's scales were not a skin disease, but rather a congenital condition. 57

56 “The Wild Man of Tennessee,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 28, 1878.

57 Ibid. Cary Blackburn was the son of Dr. Luke Blackburn, who largely due to his effort in combating yellow fever became governor of Kentucky later that year. The senior Blackburn was also notable for trying to cause outbreak of yellow fever in the north during the Civil War by shipping clothing infected with the “virus” of yellow fever into several major cities. See Nancy Disher Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, Physician, Governor, Reformer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979). John Whallen became the boss of the city's Democratic party machine. Karen R. Gray and Sarah R. Yates, "Boss John Whallen: The Early Louisville Years (1876-1883)," Journal of Kentucky Studies (1984): 171-86. 119 A short time later, Dr. L. P. Yandell, Jr., a professor of Clinical Medicine and

Dermatology at the University of Louisville, published an extensive medical diagnosis of the Wild Man. Yandell began by summarizing the exhibitor’s narrative of the Wild Man or Man-Fish, and then dismissing it: “A short time since the Tennessee and Kentucky newspapers contained a startling account of a wild man lately captured, with great difficulty, in the Cumberland Mountains.... It is scarcely necessary to say that much of this story was only showman's talk, uttered to attract the attention of the curious and credulous public.” Invited to view “the monster,” Yandell made him an object of his expertise, writing, “before seeing the case I had diagnosed it as one of ichthyosis, and a single glance was sufficient to verify the correctness of my conjecture.” Yandell carefully categorized the various varieties of ichthyosis, now understood to be a largely genetic skin disorder, that the man suffered from, describing much of his body as the “shed skin of a boa-constrictor,” while other parts resembled “the skin of a lizard or alligator about their limbs and belly” and the “skin of the buffalo-perch.”58

Having chronicled the body of this “magnificent example” of a rare skin disease,

Yandall wrote a little of the man himself: “He is considerably over six feet in height, and is a man of a low order of intelligence. He is married and is the father of several children.” None of the man's children had the disease, which was “almost if not always a congenital disease.” Yandell believed the disease was more commonly found in Europe than in America but that it was “encountered… with equal frequency among the rich and the poor.” While he stated that the condition was “commonly considered incurable, and

58 L. P. Yandell, “The Man-fish of Tennessee,” Louisville Medical News Vol. 6 No. 22 (November 30 1878): 262-264.

120 only temporarily and partially mitigable,” he offered a method he had found “successful in permanently removing ichthyosis.” Ultimately, Yandell argued, the man's condition was like most skin diseases, a result of “scrofula,” which is an infection of the lymph nodes and skin of the neck by tuberculosis bacteria. Yandell ends his report by suggesting, “In conclusion I would advise every medical man, who may have the opportunity, to see this 'Tennessee man-fish.' He is positively grand in his dermal deformity, and presents, probably, an unequaled example of the fish-skin disease.”59

Yandell was much more successful in making this Wild Man an object of his medical knowledge than the physicians of Cincinnati. The sign of the Wild Man's wildness, his fantastic skin, was largely external, in contrast to the Wild Woman’s wildness, which was based on Northecote’s narrative and her internal mental state. The

Wild Man might be a great curiosity or wonderful example of a horrible skin condition, but he was not a mystery to be adjudicated. Yandell may have rejected some aspects of the new empiricist practice of medicine—for example, he dismissed laboratory experiments that showed that calomel did not affect the liver.60 However, his theory that skin diseases were merely symptoms of an underlying disease such as scrofula were in keeping with the new therapeutic perspectives that had begun to transform medicine.61

By the 1880s, the specificity of illness based on the individual’s environment that had defined earlier generations of medical theory was on the wane. Medical practice shifted from treatment based on the application of the physician's judgment of particular

59 Ibid., 262-264.

60 Warner, 225.

61 Louisville Medical News Vol. 13 No. 14 (April 8, 1882): 175-176.

121 bodies inhabiting particular environments to the application of universally relevant knowledge developed from empirical studies. Physicians increasingly saw health as that which was normal, rather than that which was natural. The specificity that so defined earlier medical practice began to vanish. Disease and their treatments were the same for all people and in all places.62 The American belief in Wild Men was long undergirded by medical specificity and environmentalism. The Cincinnati physicians in 1856 did not believe that the Wild Woman was truly wild, but they had to examine her body to be sure. The transformation of a human being into a Wild Man was not impossible, for who knew what a specific environment could do to an individual body. By the 1880s, however, the intellectual foundation of environmentalism that made it possible for physicians to consider the Wild Man had begun to crumble.

The 1880s also saw the beginning of an even more dramatic development that would change the medical and biological foundation upon which the belief in Wild Men rested: germ theory. While transition was neither rapid nor complete, germ theory came to replace environmentalism as the central tenet of American medicine. While the idea that diseases might be caused by specific microscopic organisms had been proposed throughout the nineteenth century, the lack of conclusive scientific evidence and the deeply held belief in the environmental causes of disease meant that most physicians and lay people rejected the idea. Into the 1880s, American physicians were mostly environmentalists who saw disease as the product of harmful emanations from rotting matter or climatic conditions. As germ theory slowly emanated throughout American culture, it was intertwined with environmentalist beliefs. Germs were thought to be

62 Warner, 260-265. 122 spread by particularly unhealthy winds or to emanate from sewer gas and rotting matter.

However, beginning around 1885 and continuing for the next two decades, laboratory

research came to prove that particular organisms spread largely between other human

beings caused particular diseases. By the 1890s, germ theory had become the dominant

explanation of disease in both American medical communities and American culture at

large.63

The popularization of germ theory had a tremendous impact on how Americans

understood their relationship to the natural world. Rather than landscapes being

salubrious or malarial, capable of penetrating the body for good or ill, they were inert.64

As Americans came to believe that the environment no longer made them sick, they

increasingly rejected the idea that it could transform their bodies in any negative away.

By the 1880s, physicians had begun to explain the body in new universal ways without

reference to the environment. In so doing, they left little room for the possibility that a

body might become wild. This same decade also saw a renewed effort on the part of

physicians to explain the other great type of human disorder, that of the mind.

63 Nash, 42-52. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 27-28, 92.

64 Nash, 6. 123

CHAPTER FOUR: “Mason Evans/ “The Wild Man of the Chilhowee.”

Mason Evans was a human. He came of age and taught at the county school in the shadow of the great ranges of the Southern Appalachians. When he went mad, he left the valley for the hills. There he lived for fifty years, overlooking the valley where he had grown up and taught school. His family, his neighbors and even the county authorities cared for him as best they could. They gave him clothes and left him food, or ignored it when he stole a chicken from the hen house or potatoes from the garden. They tried to save him from his lonely life in the mountains and bring him back within the fold of the community, but they failed.

The Wild Man of the Chilhowee was a beast. His powerful body was covered in hair; his hands were claws. He devoured raw meat, lizards and terrapins and spoke not a word. He slept in the hollow of a tree or the shelter of a cave on piles of leaves. He was the terror of a community that suffered from both his thievery and the mere presence of his uncanny body. They tried to scare him off and when that failed, they hunted him down and captured him. Twice, enterprising young men were able to lay their hands upon the beast and exhibit him for all to see. Other times the county authorities paid some brave fellow to keep the beast confined, in chains when necessary. But he always managed to escape and for fifty years the community’s efforts to rid itself of the beast failed.

124 Mason Evans and the Wild Man of the Chilhowee were one. For fifty years, these two beings shared a body and existence and haunted the people of Monroe and McMinn

Counties, Tennessee.

“That any human being reared in the lap of luxury…”

In 1806, two members of the Bush River Quaker settlement in Jalapa, South

Carolina, Robert Evans and Keren-happuch1 Gaunt, married. The Quaker colony to which the newlyweds belonged was in the midst of a great upheaval. The colony, which dated back to the 1760s, had originally condoned slavery. However, as a result of the first and second Great Awakenings, the community became increasingly divided over the issue. Tensions reached a head when, between 1800 and 1804, Quaker preacher and prophet Zachary Dicks traveled to the region predicting that a slave insurrection comparable to that which took place a few years before in Haiti would soon take place. In response, many of the Friends left the area and by 1822 the Meeting had disbanded.

Many migrated to the free states of Ohio, Indiana or Illinois. Others remained in the area but left the faith. A few, like Robert and Keren-happuch Evans, settled in Tennessee.2

After living briefly in Green County, Tennessee, the Evanses settled in Monroe

County in 1820, two hundred miles from their original home. When the Evanses arrived in Monroe County it was newly open for Anglo-American settlement. In February of

1 In the Old Testament, Keren-happuch was the daughter of Job. Her name meant horn of kohl (or antimony). Kohl was a sulfide of the element antimony used in the ancient world for makeup around the eye. Thus, Keren-happuch could be translated as makeup case.

2 John Belton O'Neall, Annals of Newberry (Newberry, S.C: Aull & Houseal, 1892), 28-35.

125 1819, a group of Cherokees had conceded a portion of their Hiawassee territory to the federal government of the United States. This area was the heart of the Cherokee homeland and along the Tellico and Little Tennessee Rivers were several important communities, including the town of Chota. The ceded area became part of Tennessee on

November 13, 1819, dividing into two counties, Monroe and McMinn.3

The rivers and mountains of East Tennessee bound Monroe and McMinn

Counties. The Little Tennessee River marks the northern border of Monroe, while the

Hiawassee River runs along the southern border and the Tennessee River constitutes the western boundary of the two counties.4 Running parallel to the Tennessee River, southwest to northeast, are “the Knobs,” lines of connected, rounded hills which increase in height and size as they approach the Unicoi and Unaka ranges of the Appalachian

Mountains to the west. The Knobs and mountains divide the counties into a series of valleys. Between Athens, the McMinn County seat, and Madisonville, the Monroe

County seat, the Knobs rise to great prominence before flattening out into the Conasauga

Valley. Northeast of the Conasauga Valley lies a large cluster of Knobs named after various local families. To the southeast runs the 1,500-foot high and eleven-mile long ridge known today as Star Mountain but historically as the Chilhowee.5 The Mecca Pike

Road runs between Star Mountain and the Knobs and takes travelers from the Conasauga

3 W. F. McCarron, The Wild Man of the Chilhowee; or, Forty Years in the Wilderness, Being the Actual History and Life of Mason Evans, the Hermit ... Also Chapters on East Tennessee (Athens, TN: Athenian Print, 1886), 7.

4 The county boundaries have changed slightly over time, starting in 1839, when portions of McMinn County were included in the newly formed Polk County. However, these rivers still bound the general area of McMinn and Monroe Counties.

5 There are various mountains and mountain ranges in the area known as the Chilhowee. In this chapter the Chilhowee refers only to the above-mentioned range.

126 Valley into the Tellico Plains, the last area of farmland before the Unicoi Mountains and what is today Cherokee National Forest. About six miles beyond the pass between the

Knobs and Star Mountains in the eighth civil district of Monroe County lays the settlement of Jalapa, named after the old South Carolina home of the Evans family.

Between 1820 and 1830, thousands of Anglo-American settler families like the

Evanses established farms in the fertile valleys of Monroe and McMinn Counties. When the Evanses settled in Jalapa in 1820 there were just over 1,200 people in Monroe and only some 700 in McMinn. Ten years later, the population of McMinn had increased some twenty-fold to over 14,000, while Monroe had approximately 13,000 people. The two counties’ populations actually declined slightly in subsequent decades and did not surpass the 1830 total until a growth in manufacturing in the 1870s brought in new residents. Much of the counties’ growth was the result of settlers like the Evanses taking advantage of the removal of the Cherokees. But some of the growth came from the large number of children the settler families had. The Evanses, for example, had eight.6

Robert Evans and his family were prosperous farmers with an estate valued at

$1,200 in 1850.7 If they were like most farmers in McMinn and Monroe Counties, they produced both grain crops like wheat and corn and also raised live cattle and swine.8

While there are no firsthand accounts of farm life for the Evanses, they likely had much in common with another small farmer from the region, Timothy Sullins of the eighth

6 Historical Census Browser, Retrieved March 14, 2008, from the University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html.

7 U. S. Census Bureau, 1850 U.S. Federal Census, Schedule 1, 1st district, Monroe County, Tennessee, page 172, Dwelling 1118, Family 1118, Robert Ivens Family.

8 Carroll Van West, Tennessee Agriculture: A Century Farms Perspective (Nashville: The Tennessee Department of Agriculture, 1986), 5, 80, and 94.

127 district of McMinn County. Timothy Sullins’ diary provides a detailed account of eastern

Tennessee agriculture during the 1860s. His greatest complaints were working outside in the winter and the increasing insolence of the young slave named Jack whom he had rented. His farming methods were a mixture of the old and the new. In early April 1861,

Sullins planted 5,620 hills of sweet potatoes and noted in his diary that he did so by the light of the moon as folk custom dictated. When his fields were fallow he sowed them with clover as the best contemporary agricultural improvement societies dictated. By the end of April, he had twenty-eight acres of corn planted. He made money where he could, dealing in beef, hogs, lumber and bark for tanning hides. In December 1861, he sold six hogs weighing some 1,559 pounds to the government at 10 cents a pound. His son earned his keep selling chopped firewood.9

As the two counties rapidly filled up, over population forced many of the sons and daughters of the first generation of settlers to leave the area. The Evans family typified the break up of the early settler community. By 1851, one year after the death of Robert

Evans, only two of his children remained in the community. The oldest daughter, Abigail, had married and moved to Alabama. There she raised a family, put on weight and came to resemble her father “in size and shape and feature.”10 The two eldest sons emigrated to

DeKalb in Kemper County, Mississippi. One died soon thereafter while the other, Moses, moved on to northern Florida. Two daughters, Caroline and Octavia, married a pair of brothers and headed out west into Indian Territory in what is now Arkansas. Another

9 Timothy Sullins, Farm Journal, 1860-1863, Diaries and Memoirs Collection, I-B-3 (MS. FILES), AC. NO. 98-066, Tennessee State Library and Archives (hereafter TSLA).

10 Robert M. Evans, “Letter to J. H. Coltharp and D.C. Coltharp, May 20 1851,” copied by Robert D. Coltharp in Coltharp Family File, Genealogy Collection, Monroe County Tennessee Public Library, Madisonville, Tennessee (hereafter GC, MCTP).

128 daughter, Sophia, married and settled in Blount County on the north side of the Little

Tennessee River. Robert Milton, the youngest son, studied medicine and in 1851 headed out to DeKalb to join his older brothers. But he found the region “supplied to profusion with medical gentlemen” and moved further west, where he died sometime before 1886.

One Evans daughter, Demaris, remained in Monroe County. She married John Horner

Coltharp, who lived a few miles from the Evans’ farm, on the north side of the Cardin

Knobs. One Evans son also remained close to the family farm, though his travels would take him throughout eastern Tennessee. This son was Mason Evans and he became the

Wild Man of the Chilhowee.11

Mason Evans first appears by name in the 1850 census as Mason Ivens. The census reported that he was twenty-five years old and insane. He lived with his parents and his younger brother.12 Everything else that is known about his life prior to the 1850s, including the story of how he became first insane and then a Wild Man, comes from reminiscences of neighbors and relatives collected in the 1880s and 1890s by newspapermen.

One of the most important of these newspapermen was Wilbur F. McCarron.

During the Civil War he served as a lieutenant in the eighth regiment of the Iowa volunteer cavalry. He was stationed in Tennessee for much of the war and received commendations for a number of his actions.13 By 1886 he had returned to Tennessee and

11 Moses Evans, “Letter to W. F. McCarron, February 22, 1886,” copied by Robert D. Coltharp in Coltharp Family File, Genealogy Collection, GC, MCTP. Also republished in W. F. McCarron, 30.

12 1850 U.S. Federal Census.

13 Iowa Adjutant General's Office, Roster and Record of Iowa Soldiers in the War of the Rebellion Together with Historical Sketches of Volunteer Organizations 1861-1866: Vol. IV (Des Moines, Iowa: E. H. English, 1908-19. Published by authority of the General Assembly, under the direction of Brig. Gen. Wm. H. Thrift, 129 ran the Republican Party newspaper in McMinn County, the Athenian. As the editor of the Athenian he functioned as a contact for newspapermen from larger cities in the area like Chattanooga and Atlanta who were interested in Mason Evans. He also undertook a detailed investigation of Mason Evans’ life and wrote to Evans’ friends and family.

Following Evans’ 1886 capture by McMinn County officials, McCarron wrote and published a short book on Mason Evans’ life entitled The Wild Man of the Chilhowee.

Like most of the stories that McCarron and others told about Mason Evans, those about his early life differ in the details, but if taken together, present a coherent picture of the young man. How much these stories were influenced by what collectors like

McCarron thought the story of a Wild Man should be is uncertain, though they do show remarkable similarity to other Wild Man stories. Yet even if these stories do not convey the facts of Mason Evans’ life prior to the 1850s, they are nevertheless important because they reflect what his community understood to be his past and the origins of his wildness.

What is remarkable about Mason Evans is not that he was a man thought by some to be insane, but rather that he was a man upon whom his community came to endow the characteristics of a Wild Man. That image, embodied by the stories told about the Wild

Man’s origins, are just as important as the “true facts” of his life.

In the years before he became the Wild Man, when Mason Evans was still a young man, he lived a life of small distinctions. All those who recalled Mason Evans agreed that he was a very bright young man. McCarron goes so far as to state that he

“was regarded by all who knew him as exceptionally bright and studious.” Mason’s brother Moses Evans agreed, writing that he “was considered a talented young man and

Adjutant General. Des Moines; Emory H. English, State Printer, E. D. Chassell, State Binder; 1908), 1020. 130 acquired knowledge with considerable facility.” Many recalled that he was particularly adept at mathematics, penmanship, and nature sketches. It is unclear how long Mason attended school. One newspaper account suggested that he was highly educated and attended or at least was affiliated with the college located in Athens. But his brother

Moses Evans wrote that he did not think that Mason attended any high school or other intuition of learning other than the county school and that he garnered most of his education from close study at home.14 Regardless, his education and intellect qualified

Mason Evans to become a teacher in a county school near his home. McCarron also believed Evans was appointed a militia captain by 1841, when Evans would have still been a teenager.15

These recollections about Evans reveal two potential identities, one a smart farmer’s son who taught at a county school, the other a supremely brilliant young man who was known throughout the region for his learning and scholarship. In all likelihood

Evans was the former. Yet that so many people wished to emphasized Evans’ greatness shows how the need for a compelling story shaped the development of the narrative. The greater the man that Evans was, the more profound and interesting was his fall. What made Wild Man stories so fascinating for Euro-Americans was that they were not about distant savages or the unseemly ways of Native Americans but were instead the stories of white people just like them, people who were once true and complete members of their own community. McCarron expressed this sentiment in his introduction to Mason Evans’

14 McCarron, 7, 8. Moses Evans, “Letter to W.F. McCarron.”

15 There is no record, however, of this appointment in the Tennessee Civil And Military Commission, 1796- 1976 Record Group 195 MF Roll 2, Commission Book 7, James K. Polk, Governor, January 1, 1840- March 15, 1862, TSLA.

131 story. He wrote, “That any human being, reared in the lap of luxury, educated and refined, blessed with affectionate friends, and endowed with more than ordinary intellect, could suddenly… become transformed into a human beast, and roam for forty years… is beyond comprehension.”16

Mason Evans’ contemporaries developed a number of different theories that explained his transformation into a “human beast.” In an 1886 letter to McCarron, L. F.

Cardin, a neighbor of the Evans family and with whom the 1860 census lists Mason as living, described the most common theories that explained the origins of Mason Evans’ abandonment of society.17 According to Cardin, “Some seem to think his case hereditary, others seemed to think it the result of a spell of sickness while at his brother’s in

Mississippi; while others, and perhaps the largest portion consider it a case of unrequited love.”18 Cardin was correct in his assessment, for in published accounts unrequited love was by far the most commonly given explanation.

The most detailed version of the story of why Mason Evans abandoned the community for the forests and mountains of Monroe County comes from McCarron’s booklet. He writes,

When about 21 years of age, Mason Evans formed an ardent attachment for a beautiful and accomplished young lady, the daughter of a celebrated physician, who lived in the same county. She reciprocated his affection, and the probabilities are they were engaged to be married….We are told that this young lady’s father objected so strenuously to the match that, in order to induce her to

16 McCarron, 3.

17 U. S. Census Bureau, 1860 U.S. Federal Census Schedule One, 8th district, Monroe County, Tennessee, Page 107, Dwelling 777, Family 798, Larkin Cardin.

18 Larkin F. Cardin, “Letter to W.F. McCarron, 1886,” in W. F. McCarron, 31.

132 break off the engagement, he offered her a farm and $1,000, which she accepted.

After this disappointment in love had occurred and he began to show signs of mental aberration… [i]t was not long until he sought the seclusion of the mountains… and from that moment to this he has ceased to court the companionship of his fellow creatures. His devoted parents and affectionate brothers and sisters, neighbors, pupils and acquaintances, did everything in their power to induce him to return or accept their hospitality, but with no avail.19

Wounded by his rejection, Evans responded by abandoning all types of human relationships and in doing so abandoned his humanness.

The story that Mason Evans was driven wild by love was common to almost all newspaper accounts of his life. Linton Tedford, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, simply stated that “this man [Mason Evans] was driven to uncanny isolation by unrequited love.” 20 An 1890 article likewise briefly recounted Evans’ origins, writing that he “was highly enamored by a handsome young lady, but parental opposition prevented the marriage, and Evans left the haunts of civilized men and he has since been a denizen of the wildest portion of the Chilhowee mountains.”21 After Evans’ death, the

Chattanooga Times also published a version of the story that read, “One night he called and asked her to become his wife. She said ‘No.’ He went out into the darkness and it was many years before he was seen again.”22 Another version recalled, “The lady proved false. This seemed to have turned the brain of Evans and he wandered, seemly without

19 McCarron, 12.

20 Linton Tedford, “Jilted Lover's Life, ” Atlanta Constitution, December 13, 1896, 31.

21 “THE WILD MAN LOOSE,” Atlanta Constitution, May 1, 1890, 3.

22 “Queer Creature Dead,” Chattanooga Times, in Daily Nevada State Journal, March 17, 1892, 3.

133 purpose, to the mountains, as if to seek solace in the solitude, away from all human kind.”23 The most dramatic of the newspaper renditions of Evans’ fall claimed that as the wedding day approached the young lady eloped with one of his students. When Evans heard about her faithlessness he walked out of his schoolroom never to deal with humanity again.24 Despite the minor differences between the stories, the basic narrative of a rejected love leading to the abandonment of society is present in all.

There is evidence that suggests this story was not merely the product of a newspaperman’s imagination. Mason Evans’ brother, Moses, also supported this theory.

He mentioned in a letter to his family that “it has been said he was rejected by a young lady which so wrought upon him, as to impair his mind.” However, by the 1840s, Moses was in Kemper County, Mississippi and knew little of Mason or his condition, as he himself acknowledged.25

The origin of this story of Mason Evans’ fall may rest with other members of his family, particularly his sister Demaris and her husband J. H. Coltharp. In 1990, the editor and owner of the Independent Democrat/ Tellico Laker, Dan Hicks, claimed that the story of Mason Evans’ madness originating from rejected love was false. Hicks’ uncle, Judge

Sue K. Hicks, informed him that Mason’s mother’s family, the Coltharps, “realizing the stigma presented by an insane person, made up the story of the thwarted love affair to

23 “HEART-WRECKED,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan 25, 1886, 1.

24 “End of a Wild Man,” Monroe (Wis.) Evening Times, August 4, 1894, 3.

25 Moses Evans, 1886.

134 soften the public opinion.”26 The family’s involvement in the creation of the story of the unrequited love would explain its wide distribution.

Regardless of who created the story of Mason Evans abandoning civilization as the result of unrequited love, they were drawing upon both contemporary medicinal understandings of insanity and a well-established aspect of Wild Man folklore. Early nineteenth-century medical knowledge posited that bouts of insanity could be caused by intense emotions, particularly disappointment in love.27 Likewise, Wild Men in European culture embodied the unrestrained or mad passions of a lover. In courtly romances and ballets of the period, grief over unrequited love was a common cause of an individual becoming Wild. Yvain, Lancelot, Tristan, and Peter of Provence were all romantic heroes who suffered that fate.28

So common was this type of story that Stith Thompson included “the disappointed lover becomes a wild man in the woods” as one of the motifs in his multi-volume Index of Folk Lore.29 One tale mentioned in that volume, Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s sixteenth-century collection of Italian fairy tales, The Nights of Straparols, contains a

26 Dan Hicks, Jr., “Legend of Mason Evans, area's most famous hermit, may be just “a legend,'” Independent Democrat/Tellico Laker, December 18, 1990, 5a. By the 1860s, Demaris Coltharp was the only member of Mason Evans’ family who remained in McMinn or Monroe Counties. It fell to her and her husband John Horner Coltharp to take care of Mason. Later, that task was taken up by her daughter Susan Kerren-happach Coltharp Hicks and her son-in-law C. W. Hicks. When Sue K. Coltharp Hicks died giving birth to a son, C.W. Hicks named him after her. Sue K. Hicks, who was the assistant prosecutor at the Scopes trial and according to family lore the namesake for Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," not only carried on his family’s secret regarding Mason Evans but also the name of Mason Evans’ mother, Kerren- happach.

27 Norman Dain, Concepts of Insanity in the United States, 1789-1865 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 8.

28 Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 45.

29 Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature 5. L – Z (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1957), 351.

135 story about a Wild Man remarkably similar to that of Mason Evans. According to the story:

Now this wild man had been formerly a very handsome youth, who, through despair at his inability to win the favor of the lady he ardently loved, let go all dreams of love and urbane pursuits, and took up his dwelling amongst beasts of the forest, abiding always in the gloomy woods and bosky thickets, eating grass and drinking water after the fashion of a brute. On this account the wretched man had become covered with a great fell of hair; his skin was hard, his beard thick and tangled and very long, and, through eating herbs and grass, his beard, his hairy covering, and the hair of his head had become so green that they were quite monstrous to behold.30

The similarities between these two stories do not suggest that Mason Evans’ relatives were somehow familiar with this particular text and used it as the basis for their own story. Rather, it is evidence of the wide dispersal of stories about men wounded in love who abandon society. Whether they were inspired by a particular story or by more vague assumptions about human behavior, madness and the landscape, those who sought to create a romantic cause for Evans’ Wildness were eminently successful.

The most likely explanation for why the Coltharps would spread the story that

Mason Evans was driven mad by love was to avoid any suggestion that his insanity ran in the family. Cardin mentions that some in the community thought that Evans' insanity was hereditary. Moses Evans, likely in response to questioning by McCarron, wrote that no other member of the family suffered from mental illness.31

30 Giovanni Francesco Straparola, The Facetious Nights by Straparola, Trans. by W. G. Waters, Illustrators Jules Garnier and E. R. Hughes (London: Privately Printed for Members of the Society of Bibliophiles, 1901), 144.

31 Cardin, “Letter to McCarron.” Moses Evans, “Letter to McCarron.”

136 Social scientists and physicians of the mid nineteenth century posited a relationship between mental illness and heredity.32 Such sentiments are also found outside the medical community. The January 1841 issue of The Agriculturalist noted in an article on lunatics that “there is a predisposition in some families to derangement.”33

The Coltharps may have also believed that a romantic story would have garnered more sympathy for Evans.

Another explanation of Evans’ insanity circulated within the family. Those who thought that the romantic tales were false believed instead that Evans’ wild behavior was the result of brain damage sustained during a high fever. Judge Sue K. Hicks told his nephew C. W. Hicks that Mason was involved with a group of relatives in a scheme to float logs down to the mouth of the Mississippi. After the group sold the logs, “The

Coltharps received a letter which stated that Mason had contracted typhoid fever and the resulting high fever had damaged his brain,” a letter that Judge Hicks still possessed prior to his death in 1980.34 Robert Coltharp concurred, writing, “When Mason Evans, as a young man had had a long hard spell of typhoid fever, which left him in an exceedingly melancholy state of mind, which grew worse until he became deranged.”35 Moses Evans also mentioned that his brother suffered from an illness while visiting him in Mississippi, but he did not identify it as typhoid fever, nor did he blame it on Mason’s wildness.

According to Moses, while Mason was visiting him in Mississippi,

32 Dain, 95. John W. Fox, “Irish Immigrants, Pauperism, and Insanity in 1854 Massachusetts,” Social Science History Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991): 315-336.

33 “Lunatics,” The Agriculturist (1840): 1.

34 Dan Hicks.

35 Robert D. Coltharp, “The Coltharp Family,” in Coltharp Family File, GC, MCTPL.

137 He appeared to be sound in body and mind, but it was not long before he was taken down sick; from the symptoms I thought he had congestion of the brain. He kept his bed for a considerable time, first and last, I had doctors with him, who if they discovered any symptoms of mental derangement they never mentioned to me; after he got up he appeared home-sick and much dejected.36

Moses brought his brother back to Tennessee “at a great sacrifice of my business.”

During the course of the trip, Mason “manifested some eccentricities.” Yet according to

Moses, Mason’s wild behavior was not caused by this fever: “When I got him home I was informed that he had symptoms of mental derangement before he left home, but was thought to have recovered of it, when he left for Mississippi.”37 Thus from Moses’ account it is unclear if the high fever caused Mason’s odd behavior or simply exacerbated an already existing condition.

The Hicks and Coltharps were correct, however, in thinking that typhoid fever can result in brain damage. Typhoid fever is today understood as the product of the typhoid bacillus Salmonella tythi, a food and water-born pathogen spread by urine and resulting in fever, delirium, enlargement of the spleen, abdominal pain and other systemic manifestations. The high fever and delirium associated with typhoid might account for

Mason Evans’ strange behavior. Contemporary studies of typhoid in India and Nigeria suggest the disease could cause brain damage and even schizophrenia.38 It is unclear, however, what farmers in mid nineteenth-century eastern Tennessee meant by typhoid

36 Moses Evans, “Letter to McCarron.”

37 Ibid.

38 B. Osuntokun, O. Bademosi, K. Ogunremi, and S.G. Wright, Neuropsychiatric, “Manifestations of typhoid fever in 959 patients,” Archives of Neurology Vol. 72 (197): 7-14. P.M. Udani, Vimla Purohit, and Paresh Desai, “Typhoid Fever in Children in the Past and Present Multi-Drug Resistant Type with Special Reference to Neurological Complications,” Bombay Hospital Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2 ( April, 1999), from http://www.bhj.org/journal/1999_4102_apr99/reviews_279.htm.

138 fever. Gunns’ Domestic Medicine, a popular medical handbook printed in Monroe

County in the 1830s and 1840s, contains an entry for Bilious Fever, a name often associated with typhoid, but it lacks any emphasis on the abdominal pain associated with the disease.39 However, both nineteenth-century and contemporary medicine suggest that insanity can result from physical damage to the brain as a result of high fever, regardless of the origins.

Whether the source was heredity, unrequited love, or disease, by 1850 Mason

Evans' family and community understood him to be wild or insane. He had abandoned the community, stopped performing any productive labor and instead spent his days in the Knobs and the mountains that lay near his parents’ home in Jalappa. He avoided contact with his family, returning only at night to pick up food his mother left out for him.40 Evans’ behavior was utterly antisocial; he refused to spend time or even speak to other human beings. J. H. Coltharp informed McCarron that, while some of the “baser characteristics of human nature” were noticeable in the early years of his “dementia,” they were “never sufficiently so to make his approach when alone, or his presence, embarrassing to the ladies.”41 He was also destructive to property, stealing fowl to eat or in some cases for companionship. According to Cardin, he would “go into a cornfield without the owner’s knowledge and hoe out many rows of corn, pull and bind fodder, and

39 John C. Gunn, Gunn's Domestic Medicine: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986).

40 McCarron, 12.

41 Ibid., 22.

139 many other such things.”42 But it was his inhabitation of the wilderness that most of all marked him as insane or wild.

In the first decades of abandonment of the community, Mason Evans was of little interest to anyone outside of his family. They cared for him and considered him to be simply insane. He was sent to an asylum in Nashville but he soon escaped back home.

After that he spent his time in the woods or at neighboring houses like the Cardins’.

When his parents died in 1850 they left him 160 acres and Robert M. Evans took over guardianship of his brother.43

Unlike his parents, Robert was unwilling to let his brother roam wild. Robert confined Mason to the family farm until he moved first to Mouse Creek in McMinn

County and eventually to the western frontier where he died some time in the 1850s.

According to Cardin, Mason’s brother-in-law J. H. Caltharp took over responsibility for his care and built him a small shanty on his property a few miles away from the Evans home.44

Over the next several decades Mason Evans became of increasing interest to the residents, newspapermen and civil authorities of Monroe and McMinn Counties. While sources regarding the life of Mason Evans and the community's perceptions of that life became more abundant following the Civil War, they are still largely fragmentary recollections lacking definitive chronology. However, three important changes defined this new interest in Mason Evans. First, Mason Evans came to be described by the

42 Cardin, “Letter to McCarron.”

43 Monroe County Circuit Court, Minute Book, May 1851- May 1856, January 17, 1856, Reel 11, May 1847 to May 1857, Monroe County Circuit Court Minutes, County Microfilm collection, TSLA.

44McCarron, 13. Cardin, “Letter to McCarron.” 140 community as the Wild Man of the Chilhowee. An early example of the use of that term to describe Evans appears in court documents from January 1886, but it seems likely that the term was used to describe Evans prior to that date. Second, Evans became the target of community violence such as mock lynching, beating and kidnapping. Finally, as early as the 1860s, Evans became the target of the counties' police powers that sought to ensure the public welfare by intervening in Mason Evans' life.

“...Becomes transformed into a human beast...”

The Wild Man figure shaped the ways that institutions and individuals saw Mason

Evans. By the 1880s, newspapermen and community residents alike classified him as a creature that had taken on animal characteristics. Wilbur McCarron was instrumental in spreading the idea that Mason Evans’ life had somehow resulted in a transformation.

McCarron claimed he was motivated to share Evans’ history because he thought it was a shame for a man to be “allowed to roam like a wild beast in the woods, or mountain, with no home, but a cave, no friends, but the birds or beasts of the forest.” This may have been the case or it could have been, as Moses Evans suspected, “a sensational book, gotten up to make money and speculate on the misfortunes of my poor brother.”45 Regardless, a central theme of McCarron's depiction of Mason Evans was the contrast between Evans’ bestial nature and the progress that community and civilization created. Near the end of the biography McCarron compares the “total isolation” of Evans with “the march of progress in the last fifty years,” listing the political, scientific and cultural achievements that had taken place while Evans “has been shut out from the light of the world.” What is more, Evans’ bestial existence undermined the progress of civilization in east Tennessee.

45 Moses Evans, “Letter to McCarron.”

141 In McCarron's eyes, any community that would allow a “human beast” to inhabit the surrounding forests and mountains was merely a “pretended civilization.”46

McCarron filled the biography with details that supported his contention that

Mason Evans had become a “human beast.” Evans moved from place to place “as any animal would,” sleeping most of the day in his “den” in a “huge pile of leaves… under which he buries himself like a badger,” and “prowling at night.” McCarron likewise emphasized his animal-like eating habits, writing that Evans “was accustomed to eat anything that is ever eaten by man or beast, whether cooked or raw, flesh or vegetable.”

McCarron described in great detail how Mason would eat all manner of creatures such as lizards and terrapins and that he would consume chickens by “devour[ing] the meat raw, entrails and all, and when completed, suck the bones like a sweet morsel.”47

Yet for McCarron and the other newspapermen, Evans’ inhumanity was most clearly evident in his body. All those who wrote about Evans referred to him as a Wild

Man. They used the term not simply to mean an uncontrolled man, a man who lived outside of society, or an insane man. For them, Mason Evans was not merely a man whose mind had gone, causing him to act like an animal. Instead, he was a Wild Man, endowed with the physical traits of an animal: a hair-covered body, claws, and incredible strength that resulted from his exposure to the natural world.

Stories like the one titled “Queer Creature Dead,” which described Mason’s body as being “as hairy as that of a bear,” depicted his physical appearance in a way that was

46 McCarron, 34-35.

47 Ibid., 3 and 14-15.

142 consistent with the Wild Man image.48 Newspapermen also drew on environmentalist understandings of the human body, in which the climate and landscape an individual inhabits shapes bodily characteristics such as health, vigor or skin color, to explain

Evans’ peculiar visage. According to McCarron, the Knoxville Chronicle wrote of Evans,

“His body, from constant exposure to the elements, has become covered with hair.”49

Even McCarron, who was familiar with Evans and knew that “it is not true, however, that his body has become covered with hair,” nevertheless expressed that “it may be a wonder that it is not.” McCarron did believe that Mason’s time in the wilderness had reshaped his body in other ways, stating that his “physical development is perfect, his muscles are as hard and firm as an athlete.”50 Linton Tedford agreed with McCarron and proclaimed,

“His long experience as an athlete in the wilds had developed Herculean strength.”51 By attributing the changes to Mason Evans’ body—like fur and superhuman strength—to exposure to the natural world, these authors demonstrated that when they described

Evans as a Wild Man, they meant just that. Evans was not simply a crazy man but a being consistent with the image of the Wild Man in European and American folklore.

While McCarron’s understanding of Evans was informed by Wild Man lore, it was newspapermen from outside the area who depended upon that tradition to the greatest degree. It was these non-local reporters who described him as covered in hair or

48 Daily Nevada State Journal.

49 McCarron, 22.

50 Ibid., 23-24.

51 Atlanta Constitution, 1896.

143 claimed that “he was a terror to the country people.”52 While McCarron described Evans’

1886 capture as a peaceful event, non-local reporters wrote that he was “only captured after desperate resistance” and that “it took several men to overpower him.”53 Those who knew Evans the least were most willing to see him as a Wild Man.

The most striking example of this reimagining of Mason Evans was a drawing of him that appeared in a newspaper piece written after his 1892 death. Most other images of Evans were based on a photograph taken by Hurd and Delany of Dalton, Georgia during his 1886 capture.54 This picture was then turned into an engraving by the Photo-

Engraving Company of New York and used in McCarron's book and several newspaper articles.55

While the photograph and the engraving based on it depict Mason Evans as what one might today call a homeless man, the engraving from the Monroe Evening Times presents a very different image. Labeled “Evans the Terror,” the print depicts a man sitting in the branches of a tree.56 His head is covered with long hair sticking straight out while his beard reaches down to his neck. His body is mostly obscured by his beard and arms but appears to be covered in either his own fur or a bearskin. His legs are marked with long hairs and his hands appear to be claws. Other than the somewhat comical head

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid. See also Monroe Evening Times, 1894.

54 CABINET CARD OF THE "WILD MAN OF TENNESSEE," Silver gelatin print. Back imprint of Hurd & Delany, Dalton, GA, handwritten on back of Wild man of Tenn Cowan's Auction Inc, Catalogue 2004, Fall Historic Americana / Dec 2-3, item No. 709, from http://www.cowanauctions.com/past_sales_view_item.asp?ItemId=15652#. This photo can also be found on the cover of Ken Appollo, Humble Work & Mad Wanderings: Street Life in the Machine Age (Nevada City: Mautz, 1997).

55 Atlanta Constitution, December 13, 1896, 31.

56 Evening Times (Monroe, Wisconsin), August 4, 1894, 3. 144 of hair, the picture represents an image almost indistinguishable from the images of Wild

Men found in early modern European art.

Examining the 1886 Hurd and Delany photograph of Mason Evans, it is hard to imagine how his contemporaries saw him as a creature as hairy as a bear endowed with

Herculean strength. Today’s biological and medicinal knowledge do not allow the modern reader-observer to believe that Mason Evans’ life would leave him with either a fur pelt or extreme strength. But what cannot be seen in the picture is both the nineteenth- century American conviction that the environment could transform the body and the rich tradition of stories that attest to that possibility.

While newspaper accounts of Wild Men can be found across America, the

Appalachian region of the American south was the home to the greatest number of Wild

Man folktales. In fact, most of the Wild Man tales collected in the early part of the twentieth century, such as “Yahoo” tales and others, come from that region.57 Why so many Wild Man folktales were found in the Appalachian region is unclear. While it is possible that Wild Man folktales are particularly common to Appalachia, it may simply be that there has been a more concerted effort to record the rural tales of that region compared to others.58 This seems particularly likely given the fact that, while newspapers across the country contained Wild Man stories, few Wild Man folktales were collected outside of the region.

57 See Chapter 2.

58 Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990). David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 145 Regardless of whether these stories were particular to the region, they are evidence of a vibrant Wild Man tradition in American culture and in the mountain south.

Along with the appearance of Wild Man figures in popular literature in the period, both in classics like Orson and Valentine and Gulliver's Travels, or in more modern literature, these stories help explain why newspapermen like McCarron inscribed the image of the

Wild Man so fully upon Mason Evans. In telling a story about a man who left society, lived in the woods and then degenerated so far as to become enveloped with the characteristics of a beast, these authors simply followed an already established narrative template.

Yet just because Mason Evans inhabited a world where it was possible for others to see him as a Wild Man did not mean that they would do so. To better understand why so many people told stories about Mason Evans as a hairy, powerful and fearsome Wild

Man, it is useful to look at a group of Wild Man stories from elsewhere in the region.

Between 1885 and 1890, the inhabitants of the Georgia/Tennessee border spotted another

Wild Man. Unlike the case of Mason Evans, the residents of Chattanooga and Walker

Counties in Georgia did not know who this individual was. Given that this “Wild Man of

Tennessee” appeared an easy sixty miles down the valley from Evans’ abode in

Chilhowee Mountain, it very well could have been Mason Evans himself.

Regardless, this Wild Man was to the community and the newspapermen alike an unknown and thus a blank slate upon which they could draw the image of the Wild Man.

According to one account, a resident of the Georgia/Tennessee border “saw a man, stark naked with hair all over his body, finger and toe nails looking like the claws of a wild animal.” Another newspaper reported on the “Genuine Wild Man who haunts the

146 mountain region of the country. He is described as a being of gigantic stature, covered in a thick growth of hair, and carries in his hand a huge knotted stick.” The author even called the Wild Man a “Modern Orson,” a reference to the Wild Man of the early modern

European romance Valentine and Orson. Unlike in the case of Mason Evans, no other name was given to the Wild Man. He had no other identity or connections with the community; thus he was not a person but simply the image of the Wild Man come to life.59

In contrast, Mason Evans' identity never vanished into the image of the Wild Man of the Chilhowee. He remained close to the community from which he hailed and where his sister and her family remained. Even today, people in the county remember Mason

Evans and recall their grandparents telling stories about feeding the Wild Man to whom they were distantly related.60 But while Mason Evans never entirely disappeared into the

Wild Man of the Chilhowee, it seems that by the 1880s the latter identity was increasingly prominent. As Mason Evans slowly lost his personal connections to the community when his family moved away and as the first generation of settlers who knew him as a man died out, he became more like the Wild Man in Walker County, an unknown individual who could be fully inscribed with the image of a Wild Man.

59 “A Wild Man of the Mountains,” Atlanta Constitution, January 9, 1885, 8. “The Wild Man Abroad Again,” Atlanta Constitution, March 16, 1889, 2. “Georgia's Wild Man of the Woods,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 8, 1889, 8. “THE WILD MAN OF TENNESSEE,” New York Times, February 8, 1889, 1. “The Wild Man of Tennessee,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 11, 1889, 6. Atlanta Constitution, September 4, 1890, 4.

60 While conducting research in the area, I contacted several local history and genealogy societies, all of which were familiar with the story of Mason Evans either from local histories or newspaper stories. Individuals at these societies put me in touch with a few of the older county residents who were related to the Evans family or lived near the area he inhabited. Most of these older residents were in very ill health and thus unavailable for interviews. I was able to interview one individual over the phone who was a distant relative of Mason Evans. She recalled her family telling her stories about how the family fed Evans and how he took food from their fields. 147 “…And roams for forty years...”

Mason Evans/The Wild Man of the Chilhowee existed as both man and creature.

In the eyes of his few relatives and those who offered him charity, he was a man to be pitied and cared for. But what of the structures of law and political authority that carried the ultimate responsibility for determining who Mason Evans/The Wild Man of the

Chilhowee was and for regulating his life? To answer that question, it is necessary to look at the years following the Civil War when Evans came to the attention of the county authorities.

In April 1866, the Monroe County court assumed responsibility for Mason Evans.

According to the county court minutes, William Richardson, a sixty-year-old farmer from the eighth civil district, was issued a twenty-five dollar certificate for “taking care of

Mason Evans an insane lunatic.” While there is evidence that Evans was cared for by individuals outside his family, such as L. F. Cardin, with whom he is listed as living with in the 1860 census, the payment of William Richardson marks the first time that the county court assumed ultimate responsibility for Evans.61

For the next several years Monroe County continued to provide funds for the care of Mason Evans. In January 1867, the court paid Samuel Elliott, a farmer from the eighteenth district, for “Keeping Mason Evans three months.” In the summer of 1867,

William Richardson was again paid by the county to care for Evans. By 1868 the county was no longer paying individuals to care for Evans. Instead, Robert Henderson, who was married to L.F. Cardin's daughter, received twenty dollars in January and thirty dollars in

61 Monroe County Court, “April Session, 1866,” Minute Book, May 1864-Dec 1868, in Roll 23, Monroe County Clerk, September 1858-July 1871, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

148 April to provide food and clothing to Mason Evans, but without the provision that he

“keep” or “take care of” him.62

The county court minutes do not provide specifics as to what the keeping of

Mason Evans entailed. McCarron, however, provides some details about the nature of keeping the Wild Man of Monroe County. He writes:

Mason was left in the hands of the county authorities. Sometimes they pretended to care for him, and sometimes they did not. He was frequently locked up, or chained down, in some isolated cabin, in charge of some man, who for a small sum of money paid by the county would undertake to care for him.… He would therefore escape at every convenient opportunity.63

This pattern of short periods of confinement paid for by the county followed by an escape seems consistent with the court record. McCarron also mentions that Evans often took shelter at the home of Parson Henderson, presumably the Robert Henderson of the court records. In the 1880 census, Mason Evans was listed as a pauper boarding with Benedict

Ellis, a farmer from the eighth district of Monroe County. It is likely that Ellis was also paid by the county to take care of Evans.64

This mixture of care, confinement, and neglect that Evans received from the county authorities was not the only community reaction to his wild life. By the 1870s, enveloped by the image of the Wild Man of the Chilhowee and with increasingly limited personal connections to family members and individuals who could protect him, Mason

62 Monroe County Court, “January 1867,” “July Session 1867,” “January 1868,” “April 186,” Minute Book, May 1864-Dec 1868, in Roll 23, Monroe County Clerk, September 1858-July 1871, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

63 McCarron,13.

64 U. S. Census Bureau, 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Schedule 1, 8th District, Monroe County, Tennessee, ED 205 Sheet 21, Dwelling 183, Family 189, Ellis household.

149 Evans became vulnerable to violence and brutality from other community members. In the late 1870s or early 1880s, some young men from Monroe County took it upon themselves to scare Mason Evans out of the area by staging a mock lynching of him.

According to McCarron, the young men confronted Evans and threatened that unless he left the area, “they would take him out to the woods and hang him.” When Mason did not leave, “the boys proceeded to capture him and had him tied ready for execution.” After staging the mock lynching, the young men let Mason go free and he fled into McMinn

County.65 By acting out a lynching, these young men signaled that they believed Mason

Evans’ way of life was antithetical to the interests of the community.

It was not, however, this violence that finally drove Evans from Monroe County to McMinn County and Star Mountain. According to McCarron, it was the county court’s final attempt to keep Mason Evans that drove him away. McCarron writes that,

Some years ago the county authorities of Monroe County, having employed a man to take care of him, Mason was captured and chained to the floor of a little 8x10 shanty in a open field, where a scant supply of food and water was furnished, and little attention otherwise paid to him. While in this condition he was visited by some ladies of the neighborhood who, taking pity upon him, asked him if he thought he could use a file.66

The woman provided him with the file and he escaped his chains, leaving the Knobs and

Monroe County until the 1890s.

Following his escape, Mason Evans crossed into McMinn County and took up a semi-permanent abode along the border between Monroe and McMinn Counties on

Chilhowee Mountain. Evans found shelter there among the cliffs and caves and with a

65 McCarron, 16.

66 Ibid., 16 150 few farmers at the base of the mountain who allowed him space by their fires. He would also visit the kitchen of the new health resort at White Cliff Springs that had been built on top of the mountain, where the high elevation allowed southern elites to avoid the summer yellow fever season. Yet while living on Chilhowee Mountain, Evans was not able to avoid interference from the civil authorities. Even more so than in Monroe

County, the authorities of McMinn understood Mason Evans to be the Wild Man of the

Chilhowee and sought to remove him from the spaces of his wildness. Starting in 1886,

Evans was the target of a number of attempts by the county authorities to capture, confine, and clothe him.

During the January session of 1886, the McMinn County court deemed Mason

Evans to be a Wild Man. At this session it was “ordered by the court that Mason Evans

‘The Wild Man of the Chilhowee’ be taken and sent to the poor house.” Remarkably, the label “Wild Man of the Chilhowee” first appears in the historical record not in newspaper accounts or community memory but as a term used by the courts to authorize his confinement.67 This order meant that, “on the 9th day of January 1886, at the insistence of

S. H. Thompson, Equ. of the 13th civil district of McMinn county, Mason was captured and brought to Athens.”68 S. H. Thompson was a Justice of the Peace and, as a resident of the thirteenth civil district that lay near the border with Monroe County and Chilhowee

Mountain, he was likely aware of Evans’ occupation of the nearby Panther Cliff cave. In fact, McCarron called the area below the cliff “the Thompson and Cass

67 McMinn County Court, “January Session 1886,” Minute Book, Vol. 4, 2, in Roll 87, McMinn County Clerk, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

68 McCarron, 21.

151 neighborhoods.”69 In all likelihood, Thompson had encountered Evans firsthand. Once brought to town, county officials paraded Evans through the streets, photographed him, gave him suit of clothes and placed him in the poorhouse or jail, from which he quickly escaped. He fled twenty miles east back to his brother-in-law J. H. Coltharp's house.

Shortly thereafter, he returned to his cave on Chilhowee Mountain.70

There does not appear to have been any legal proceedings declaring that Evans was a lunatic recorded in the McMinn County Court minute book prior to the court’s order in January 1886. Strangely, such a statement did appear in the April 1886 minutes, some 52 pages after the January court order, yet was dated January 7, 1886, two days before Evans’ capture. Jasper Casteel, an illiterate laborer, swore that “Mason Evans is a man of unreasoned mind to the best of his knowledge….that said Evans is not capable of taking care of himself and that it is injurious to the community to allow said Evans to run at large.” Casteel sighed his mark with an “X.” Below that appears the signature of S. H.

Thompson, the Justice of the Peace who authorized Mason Evans’ capture.71 Why Jasper

Casteel was the only person who was able to testify to Evans’ unreasoned mind, let alone why this statement is dated prior to Evans’ capture yet appears in the minutes months later, is unclear. It suggests, however, that Thompson and other county leaders wanted some clearer justification for their confinement of Evans. One newspaper account written after Evans’ death stated that there was a lunacy hearing during his 1886 capture but that

69 Ibid., 19.

70 Ibid., 27. “The Wild Man,” Athens Daily Post, January 15 1886, 3.

71 McMinn County Court, “April Session 1886,” Minute Book, Vol. 4, 54, in Roll 87, McMinn County Clerk, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

152 during the trial Evans jumped out the window and escaped, ending the matter.72 No record of such a hearing, however, can be found in the records.

The pattern of McMinn County authorities seeking to both confine and clothe

Evans continued into July 1886. During that session, the court made both long and short- term provisions for Evans. First, W.H. McCarron was entrusted with purchasing clothing for Evans “when ever he is captured,” for which he was issued a fifteen-dollar warrant.

Larkin Carden and John Daugherty, a farmer from the thirteenth district of McMinn, were “appointed and requested to look after said Evans and capture him if possible.”73 By seeking to capture, confine and clothe Evans, the county sought to remove the manifestations of Evans' wildness, his roaming at large and his tattered physical appearance. Once Evans was confined and clothed, the County authorities hoped to rid themselves of him once and for all by sending him to the state lunatic asylum in

Knoxville. This effort failed and the authorities of McMinn County soon lost interest in capturing the being they called the Wild Man of the Chilhowee. County authorities never again captured Evans and he continued to roam at large around Chilhowee Mountain.

Some community members fed him and provided him with shelter while enduring his petty pilfering while others treated him with brutality, kidnapping and assaulting him.

In the last decade of his life, Mason Evans suffered the misfortune of being captured twice, once in the 1880s and then again in 1890, by private persons who hoped to exhibit him for profit as a Wild Man. During the first of these two incidents, “he was

72 Evening Times, 1894.

73 McMinn County Court, “July Session 1886,” Minute Book, Vol. 4, 66, in Roll 87, McMinn County Clerk, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

153 captured by some fearless fellow with an enterprising turn of mind for the purpose of entering him in a dime museum as the ‘Wild man of Borneo.’”74 In 1890, Mason Evans was again “captured last week by a party of men who hunted for him and intended to exhibit him through out the country.” The men took Evans from his abode on Star

Mountain to Athens and set up a sideshow.75 In both cases, Evans’ capturers did not see him as a person, protected by law and custom, but rather as a mere extraordinary body with which they might do as they liked.

The rendering of Mason Evans into a body comparable to the noted sideshow attraction the Wild Man of Borneo was an exceptional event. Americans saw the typical sideshow Wild Man as an extraordinary body because he was a cultural or racial other who had never been and never could be part of Anglo-American culture.76 These men saw Mason Evans, who in the 1886 photograph appears to the modern eye to be merely a poorly dressed and tired old man, as a being that individuals would pay money to gaze upon.

Yet this violence against Evans required not only that these few men exclude him from the community of human beings but that the community as a whole do so as well.

The Chattanooga Times saw Evans’ early 1880s tormentor in a very positive light when it referred to him as an “enterprising” and “fearless fellow.”77 His 1890 capture was a

74 “Queer Creature Dead,” Chattanooga Times, in Daily Nevada State Journal, March 17, 1892, 3.

75 “Wild Man Captured,” Chattanooga Daily Times, April 30, 1890, 5. “THE WILD MAN LOOSE,” Atlanta Constitution, May 1, 1890, 3.

76 See Chapter 2.

77 Chattanooga Times, in Daily Nevada State Journal, March 17, 1892, 3.

154 highly public event that “considerably aroused” the city of Athens.78 Evans’ captors were even able to hold an exhibition of him within the city. But there was seemingly no public outcry against these kidnappings and no attempt by the citizenry or county authorities to force Evans’ release.

Only one man objected to Mason’s 1890 capture. An unnamed lawyer, likely

Mason Evans’ grandnephew C.W. Hicks, informed the kidnappers after their first show that further attempts to hold Evans prisoner would “certainly be resisted and that all concerned tonight should expect trouble.”79 This lone objection was the only thing that separated Mason Evans the man from an existence as the bare body of the Wild Man of the Chilhowee. Mason Evans’ humanity was contingent upon recognition and acknowledgment by members of his extended family and their friends. One respected member of the community threatening legal repercussions was sufficient to garner Evans’ release.

C.W. Hicks was likewise responsible for defending Evans against the final assault upon his humanity when Hicks filed suit against three men who nearly killed Evans in

1891. These three men, Amos Scruggs and Frank and Jessie McDonald, assaulted Evans, then in his late sixties, leaving him “severely bruised, cut and torn by dogs and otherwise maltreated.”80 That these men were willing to inflect such harm upon an old man illustrated how some in the community had completely dehumanized Evans. The stories of him as a Wild Man, combined with his unusual behavior and abandonment of the

78 Atlanta Constitution, 1890.

79 Ibid.

80 Dan Hicks.

155 polity, had rendered him vulnerable to mistreatment by private individuals. The men who savaged Evans could not have believed that anyone would care what happened to him.

While the outcome of the case is unclear from the records, it seems that those who assaulted Evens were only held responsible for court costs, suggesting that they were correct in thinking that the court held Evans’ life and person in low regard.81

In April 1891, likely in response to the brutal assault by Scruggs and the

McDonald brothers earlier in the year, Monroe County made one last attempt to capture, confine and clothe Mason Evans. According to the minutes, the county court ordered the commissioners of the poor to “make some arrangement with some person or persons in the said County of Monroe to capture and confine the said Mason Evans in a suitable and as comfortable quarters as feasible every thing considered to feed and clothe him and do and perform such thing for his comfort as said commissioners may decide,” as long as the price did not exceed one hundred dollars.82 Once again, the interest of the court was to capture, confine and clothe Evans and thus remove physical manifestations of his

Wildness: his habitat and his appearance.

Like all other efforts, this last attempt to tame the Wild Man failed. In January of

1892, at the age of sixty-eight, Mason Evans died. Despite the numerous newspaper articles which soon appeared celebrating his Wild life, details of his death are lacking.

81 Monroe County Circuit Court, “State of Tennessee v. Amos Scruggs,” Minute Book, May 1889- September 1891; May 1891, 413; September 1891, 569, 588, in Reel 16, Monroe County Circuit Court, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

82 Monroe County Court, “April Term, 1891,” Minute Book, Vol. 2, 168, in Roll 27, Monroe Court Clerk, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

156 However, during the April session of the Monroe County court, the court cared for and clothed Evans a final time by paying for his burial clothes.83

“...Is beyond comprehension”

In the seemingly inconsistent mixture of violence and charitable treatment that

Mason Evans received from the civil authorities and citizens of Monroe and McMinn

Counties lay the meaning of the Wild Man of the Chilhowee. The twin orders of civil authorities to capture and confine Evans while seeking to ensure his every comfort were not the separate product of chance or confusion within the workings of two local governments. Care and cruelty are not inconsistent if we take seriously the meaning of the image of the Wild Man that enveloped Mason Evans and the model of police power that Michel Foucault and others have termed “Pastoral Power.”

Other than his brief stay at the state asylum in the early 1850s, Mason Evans was subject to legal and civil but not medical authority. His wildness was not identified or treated by physicians or psychiatrists. He did not suffer the regimen of the asylum described by Michel Foucault in which the patient internalized guilt and “objectif[ied] himself to the Other.”84 The American asylum was largely custodial in nature for most of the nineteenth century. Its system of custodial care was, as historian David Rothman argues, developed during the Jacksonian Age as Americans sought to impose order on a fragmenting society through the confinement of people with abnormal behavior such as paupers, vagabonds, criminals and the insane. The goal of such confinement was to

83 Ibid.

84 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization; A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books), 273.

157 remove these individuals from the environment that produced their abnormality.

Following the Civil War, however, these institutions abandoned their curative functions due to cost and became largely punitive. The “moral treatment” employed by Phillip

Pinel and Samuel Turke in Europe in which humane care and the patients' own moral self-discipline cured insanity was never firmly established in the United States. At first it was only employed on a small number of upper- and middle-class patients. Once asylums became a place for the mass of insane poor, their numbers and the prejudices of physicians prevented effective implementation of the moral system. Asylums in America thus had a more custodial than curative role.85

McCarron’s booklet gives evidence of the inability of asylums to accommodate the poor and implement a curative moral treatment for patients. Supposedly publishing his booklet on Mason Evans in order to reform the care of the insane, McCarron includes a section on “The Question of Insanity in Tennessee.” McCarron argued that Evans

“might long since have been restored to the bosom of his family and the enjoyment of life as a man of sound mind,” if only the public had provided funds for the treatment of cases such as his. McCarron includes a letter from the superintendent of the East Tennessee

Hospital for the Insane who argues that the nearly six hundred insane poor housed in various county jails and poor houses should be given “all the advantages of treatment in a hospital thereby restoring many of them to health.” McCarron also concludes that the same might be done for those lunatics kept by their families. The state needed to spend

85 Dain, 205. Lawrence B. Goodheart, Mad Yankees: The Hartford Retreat for the Insane and Nineteenth- Century Psychiatry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 7. Peter McCandles, “Curative Asylum, Custodial Hospital, the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum and State Hospital, 1828-1920,” in The Confinement of the Insane, International Perspectives, 1800-1965, ed. Roy Porter and David Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). David J. Roth, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Brown and Little), 58-59, 71, 166, and 237-239.

158 $75,000 to double the size of the hospital and thus “transfer their account from the counties to the State.” McCarron likewise advocated,

No longer need the insane be imprisoned in jails and made incurable by neglect and brutal treatment. No longer need they linger in wretched hovels or poorhouses-most of which in our State are crimes against civilization-but for the State reach out her strong arm and on wings of mercy brings them to a home with hope of cure; home where sympathy, kindness, and comforts will be offered them with the hope of leading them back to light and life.86

While McCarron did wish for Mason Evans to be subjected to a medical regime that would bring him back to life, this was not to be.

Instead, Mason Evans inhabited a world more akin to the two periods which

Foucault describes as existing prior to the development of moral treatment. In the first, the mad wandered about aimlessly. In the second, which Foucault deems “the great confinement,” all those understood by the state to be unreasoned, such as the criminal, the poor, the libertine and the mad, were confined together.87 Evans’ life as a “man of unreasoned mind” was alternately a wandering one and one in which he was treated as a vagabond, pauper, lunatic, and Wild Man, but not a mental patient.

Doctrines of law and governmentality are much more useful for understanding the confluence of care and cruelty with which the community and state treated Mason Evans than is the development of psychiatric medicine. As William J. Novak argues, historians of the American state have too often mistaken the use of juridical rule and a defuse power

86 McCarron, 41-47.

87 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 8-9, and 38-39.

159 structure for weakness in the American state.88 In his book, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America, Novak details how nineteenth-century legal and political culture was based on the idea of a well-ordered community. In this vision of the community, salus populi, or the people's welfare, took precedence over individual rights. Liberty meant the power of the local community to engage in self- governance. At the heart of this regimen of common law governance were local police powers, in which the polity assumed responsibility for the people's wellbeing and welfare. Police powers touched upon all facets of life, including public safety, health, property, economy and morality. The polity could destroy property, ban trades, and imprison the immoral, all in the interest of the public good. This local governance was the foundation for the “simultaneous freedom and order enjoyed in a community.”89

The county courts in nineteenth-century Tennessee are a prime example of this common law polity. They were not merely a minor judicial body but instead the location of civil authority and police powers dedicated to the preservation of the public welfare.

The 1858 Code of Tennessee defined the county court as “a court comprised of the magistrates of the county for the dispatch of probate and other business entrusted to it.”

The justices of the county court, or the justices of the peace as they were also known, were “the representatives of the county and authorized to act for it.” The two justices of

88 William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” The American Historical Review Vol. 113 No. 3 (June 2008): 752-772.

89 William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 1-12.

160 the peace elected by each district within a county were not necessarily lawyers by training but were rather the wealthiest and most influential men in the county.90

The County Court had a diverse set of powers and responsibilities. It had original jurisdiction over probate matters such as wills, the administration of estates, and the appointment and administration of guardianships. It could bind apprentices, change names and partition land and slaves. It was also responsible for the “issuance of inquisitions of unsoundness of mind,” had original jurisdiction over bastardy, and was responsible for the supervision of bastards. Those willing to emancipate slaves needed the court’s consent, and it retained “power over emancipated slaves and free Negroes.”

Its Justices of the Peace were responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of the slave system, including organizing patrols and trying all non-capital slave offenses. Likewise, the county court controlled the movement of persons of “ill-character,” such as vagrants who would “saunter about neglecting [their] business.”91 The court could prevent these vagrants from moving to a new county and could imprison them at will. Other functions performed directly or indirectly through the appointment of officers included support for the poor, lunatics and idiots, the construction and maintenance of road and buildings, capture and care of stray animals, and the arrest of criminals. In matters as diverse as wolf bounties and regulating fences, it was the county court or its constitutive justices of the peace who enforced regulations.92 The county court was thus responsible for regulating those persons who, while physically present within the county, were excluded

90 Return Jonathan Meigs, William Frierson Cooper, Joseph Brown Heiskell, Micajah Bullock, Samuel Temple Bicknell, and James Horton Shankland, The Code of Tennessee. Enacted by the General Assembly of 1857-'8 (Nashville, Tennessee: E.G. Eastman and Co., State printers, 1858), 104, and 139.

91 Ibid., 359-360.

92 Ibid., 510-511. 161 from the community in some way. These misfits included blacks, bastards, the insane, and those persons of “ill-character” who were not productive.

The manner in which Mason Evans was treated by the County Courts was consistent with the doctrine of public welfare and the organization of the civil authority in

Tennessee. He was both cared for and captured by the county courts because they were the location of the polities' police powers. They provided him with clothes and shelter because the judges saw it as in the interest of the community. They chained him in shacks and ordered him taken from his home in the mountains for the same reason. These local elites and the institutions they comprised were entrusted by the common law to look out for the public’s safety and wellbeing. The authorities could exercise legal control over him not because he violated a law, or even because he was medically insane, but because everything and everyone present within the polity was subject to police power. To have

Mason Evans free was a threat to that wellbeing, for his wild life contradicted the social order of a well-governed community. He refused to remain within the confines of ordered space or engage in socially or economically productive intercourse. By escaping confinement and refusing to allow the county to tame him, he undermined the police powers of the state. He was an inversion of everything a good and proper man should be, and thus his mere unruly existence was an affront to the civil authorities.

This police power that Novak illustrates and which can be seen in the operation of the county courts of Tennessee was the type of power which Foucault described as

Pastoral Power. Using the analogy of how a shepherd takes responsibility to feed, breed and personally guide each individual animal in his flock, Foucault described Pastoral

Power as an individualizing power in which some persons and institutions take

162 responsibility to “constantly ensure, sustain, and improve the life of each and every one” who existed within the polity. Foucault differentiates this Pastoral Power from the political power concerned with the relationship between the citizen and the polity. The latter is the power wielded over a “legal subject,” while the former is the power wielded over “live individuals.” Pastoral Power can be differentiated from Foucault's larger conception of biopower because Pastoral Power is concerned with the life of the individual while biopower is concerned with the life of the population.93

In a recent article, anthropologist Anand Pandian argues that we should take the analogy at the heart of Foucault's description of Pastoral Power literally. Pandian finds the mixture of care and control in the South Indian governance of animal nature in both humans and livestock. Pandian posits a relationship between the governance of animals and “the particular conditions of modernity that constitute certain human lives as animal object of government.”94 According to Pandiam, “attributions of animality support numerous ways in which stern control may be rationalized as the most appropriate form of care.”95 The conflation of human beings and animals in the discourse reflected and produced the conflation of methods by which both human beings and animals were governed. Thus the equation of a human being with an animal was more than an analogy or a way of justifying unequal treatment; it could result in the treatment of a human being as an animal.

93 Michel Foucault, “'Omnes et Singulatim': Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Vol. 3, Power (London: Penguin, 2002), 298-235.

94 Anand Pandian, “Pastoral Power in the Postcoloy: On the Biopolitics of the Criminal Animal in South India,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 23 No. 1 (February 2008): 86.

95 Ibid., 92.

163 This process of animalization is abundantly clear in the case of Mason Evans, as he is repeatedly described and treated not as a man but as a Wild Man or human beast. As a beast, he would not be subject to the moral treatment of the asylum by which he was brutalized into objectifying himself. Instead, he led the animal existence that Foucault describes as typical for the mad man of his “classical period.”96 He was confined, physically restrained, or fed and sheltered like any animal, but he could not lead a political or moral existence. At most, confining and clothing him might result in a type of domestication that would reverse the environmental changes that had dehumanized him.

McCarron motions to the possibility of domesticating Evans. Between his biography of Mason Evans and before his discussion of insanity in Tennessee, he includes a chapter from Henry Howes' 1857 The Historical Collections of the Great

West: Containing Narratives of the Most Important and Interesting Events in Western

History, entitled “Wild Bill or the Mississippi Orson.” The story, itself a reprint of an

1834 newspaper article, describes the capture and attempted domestication of a Wild Boy found in Mississippi in 1809. Following Wild Bill’s capture, he was “carried and placed in the family of Mr. Benjamin Rollins for domestication.” The result was his “partial domestication,” though the author laments that “few details of the character or domestication of Wild Bill remain.”97 The repeated use of the term “domestication” to describe the process by which the community would transform Wild Bill into a productive member attests to the conflation of animal and human nature in nineteenth-

96 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 72-76.

97 Henry Howe, The Great West: Containing Narratives of the Most Important and Interesting Events in Western History -- Remarkable Individual Adventures --sketches of Frontier Life -- Descriptions of Natural Curiosities: to which is Appended Historical and Descriptive Sketches of Oregon, New Mexico, Texas (New York: Published by G.F. Tuttle, 1858), 271-272. 164 century American society. Just as farmers understood there to be a commonality between the physical bodies of humans and animals, so too was there an understanding that the transformation of an unproductive living being into a productive one required much the same process of stern control in human and beast. If the control, care and confinement of domestication was the difference between a fat gentle hog and a lean and fierce hog, it could also be the difference between the productive community member and the Wild

Man. McCarron's appropriation of this story for his booklet and its placement between his biography of Evans and his essay on how Evans could be redeemed by the asylum suggests that McCarron understood the latter action to be a type of domestication.

But there is something more going on in the animalization of Mason Evans. It should not be thought of as a mere attempt to justify his treatment; rather, there was particular meaning in the transformation of Mason Evans into the Wild Man of the

Chilhowee. The county authorities exercised pastoral police powers over numerous individuals without their animalization into Wild Men. All individuals in the community were subject to police powers and various paupers and lunatics were objects of stern and particular care by the polity. Yet the polity did not define any other persons as animals or

Wild Men. Why, then, was Mason Evans inscribed with the exceptional identity of the

Wild Man of the Chilhowee?

Giorgio Agamben, in his work Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life, argues that sovereign power is the power to exclude something from the juridical order.

A being that the law places outside the juridical order is not indifferent to but rather abandoned by it.98 Agamben draws attention to two cases in ancient western law where,

98 Georgrio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 165 in response to a great crime, the individual is not punished but rather abandoned by the law: the homo sacer or “sacred man” of Roman law and the wolf man or weargesheafod

(“wolf’s head”) of Anglo-Saxon law.99 These beings were outlaws in the fullest sense of the term. Both these beings could be killed without their murders being deemed homicides and yet they could not be sacrificed in religious rituals. They were like animals in that their lives or deaths were without meaning or consequences in relationship to the community. They were what Agamben refers to as “bare life,” beings with a biological life but not the life of a human.100

The Wild Man of the Chilhowee was eerily reminiscent of Agamben's homo sacer. He existed in the state of exception; he was both wild and outside of the polity, yet he was exposed to the force of the polity. He was simply a being, with no political or moral meaning and identity. Yet Mason Evans, as opposed to a being who was simply a

Wild Man, was never completely enveloped by the image of the Wild Man. While the

Wild Man could be captured and exhibited, the law protected Mason Evans. With these two identities, Mason Evans/the Wild Man of the Chilhowee straddled the line between inclusion and exclusion.

To be abandoned by the law as homo sacer, wolf man, or Wild Man was a punishment for a great crime against the community. The best articulation of Mason

Evans’ crimes comes from Joseph Casteel's 1886 statement, a statement rooted in the

2001), 21, and 29.

99 Ibid., 74, and 104.

100 Agamben argues that history has seen an increased politicization of life and creation of bare life by the state and in modernity. Exemplified by the concentration camp, it has come to include all human life. 139- 140. Yet the period of Mason Evans is not yet modern. The Wild Man has more in common with the bare life of Rome than the bare life of the camp.

166 language of police powers and public welfare: “That it is injurious to the community to allow said Evans to run at large.”101 The injuries that Evans did to the community were many. Materially, he injured the community by stealing fowl and other foodstuffs. But if that was the primary concern of the polity, he could have been tried as a thief. On a more abstract level, he injured the community because he did not lead a productive life and thus deprived the community of his labor and industry. But idleness might be handled by the power of county authorities to enforce poor or vagrancy laws. Mason Evans’ crime was greater than theft or idleness. What made him both a Wild Man and injurious to the community was his rejection of the guiding principle that organized the nineteenth- century common law polity: that man is a social being.

Novak illustrates that the foundation of the “common-law vision of a well regulated society” was a moral philosophy that began with the belief that “Man's natural state was not to be found outside of community or in isolation from other but in society.”

This conception of man as a “fundamentally social and relational being” was a rejection of the “state of nature” understanding of man common to enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau. Society was not an unfortunate artificial state in which man found himself but rather the basis of human identity. In isolation, a man lacked the very relational qualities that made him human. Novak quotes influential common law theorist Nathanial Chipman, who wrote, “Man is, by the constitution and

101 McMinn County Court, “April Session 1886,” Minute Book, Vol. 4, 54, in Roll 87, McMinn County Clerk, County Microfilm Collection, TSLA.

167 law of his nature, fitted for society.” Likewise, the first principle of John Bouvier's important 1854 Institutes of American Law was that “Man is a social being.”102

In a community guided by the doctrine of salus populi, a man living alone in the mountains outside of town was not some noble natural man but an abomination lacking the characteristics, sociality, and affability that made men human. The transgression of

Mason Evans that was so injurious to the community was not a mere violation of the law, but rather that his existence as a man physically and socially outside yet proximate to the community undermined its very foundations.

As the Wild Man of the Chilhowee, Mason Evans fused together the two relationships upon which the well-ordered community rested: the individual to the community and the community to the environment it occupied. Mason Evans/The Wild

Man of the Chilhowee was an individual destructive to the community, both materially and socially. He was also an inhabitant and product of proximate wilderness, spaces at the margins of the community that were not objects of community production and control.103

With that in mind, it is possible to return to two captivities of our subject Mason

Evans /Wild Man of the Chilhowee, those of 1886 and 1890. Both these cases make visible the operation of sovereign power within the polities of Monroe and McMinn

Counties. In 1886, the McMinn County Court exercised its pastoral police powers to order the capture and confinement of Mason Evans, the Wild Man of the Chilhowee, not for a crime but because it was injurious to the community for him to run at large. The

102 Novak, The People’s Welfare, 29-31.

168 court signaled that Evans’ status was injurious to the community and therefore not protected by the law by referring to him as the Wild Man of the Chilhowee.

In 1890, a group of men took it upon themselves to capture the Wild Man of the

Chilhowee and exhibit him. Their undertaking was not hidden from the community or the authorities. To exhibit Mason Evans in such a manner, they must have believed that the

Wild Man of Chilhowee was not a man but merely a body, a bare life with which they might do what they liked. What they sought to exhibit was not an old weathered man but a being who had been stripped of identity and caste out from the community for the crime of living a wild life, one anathema to its standards. The exhibition was not a spectacle of some extraordinary body but rather of the fact that a human being could become merely a spectacle. The means of displaying Mason Evans lay not in how he appeared but rather that he could be displayed at all.

It was only after the intervention of the unnamed lawyer who insisted that they free Mason Evans because he was a human to whom the law applied that the men abandoned their course and set Evans free. But what if that lawyer had not appeared to insist that the law not abandon Mason Evans? What if the county court had declared that

Mason Evans was not a man but the Wild Man of the Chilhowee?

The life reconstructed here was not the life of Mason Evans. His own voice and story is hard for the historian to hear over the shouts of the men who covered him with the image of the Wild Man of the Woods. He chose to live his life largely alone in the hills and mountains a few miles from where he grew up. Sometimes he chose to leave his solitude and spend time by a kitchen fire with another human being. For a time, he lived in the mountains with another wandering man. He kept a tomcat and a rooster as pets. A

169 historian can find facts about what he did in his life but not what he thought about his acts or about the stories that other men told. We do not even know if he ever chose to speak to the world or if his words were simply not heard.

The life reconstructed here is that of a curious liminal being. It existed between man and beast, fact and fiction, and inclusion and exclusion. This being, Mason

Evans/the Wild Man of the Chilhowee, rejected the sociability and affability that rested at the heart of the nineteenth-century conception of humanity and so he existed between humanity and animality. Yet he remained in a relationship with the community, sometimes one of abandonment and sometimes one of inclusion, in which he occupied liminal spaces or proximate wildernesses that lay at the margins of the community. He thus embodied the American fear of physical spaces and beings that existed outside of community control yet were proximate to it.

170

CHAPTER FIVE: Wild and Queer: Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell.

While the life of Mason Evans was shaped far more by the county court system and local practices of governmentality than by medical and mental health systems, this was not true in the case of another Wild Man who lived a wild life for much of the same period: Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell. Prior to 1880, Lobdell was repeatedly jailed or confined in the poor house either due to his status as a Wild Man-like vagrant or because of his gender non-conformity. After 1880, Lobdell was institutionalized as insane in a custodial state asylum for the rest of his life. Lobdell’s life illustrated the changes that were taking place in the American mental health system, particularly in wealthy northeastern states like New York and Pennsylvania that possessed well developed state government and asylum systems. Second, the narratives that Americans told about

Lobdell’s wildness reveal how the inhabitation of wild space and gender non- conformance were bound together in American culture. Finally, Lobdell’s autobiography, written in 1855, is a rare example of a document in which a person who was seen by

Americans as a Wild Man described his own identity and encounter with nature.

In 1912, Joseph Israel Lobdell died, having spent thirty of his last thirty-two years in New York State asylums. Lobdell's life story has been told by many others: historians of gender and sexuality who were interested in claiming him either as the first lesbian subjected to institutionalization on the basis of sexual object choice or as a woman who

171 chose to pass as a man to enjoy both greater economic opportunity and the freedom to marry a woman. Recently, Dr. Bambi Lyn Lobdell, a relative of Joseph, has argued that he should be understood as he defined himself, as a man, and that his history is that of a transgender person. However, for this project I am most interested in another set of identities that surrounded Lobdell, that of huntress and hunter—which he claimed—and that of Wild Woman and Wild Man—which were inscribed upon him.1

Before there was Joseph Lobdell, there was Lucy Ann Lobdell. She was born in

Albany County, New York in 1829 and in 1847 her family moved to the New York side of the Upper Delaware River. Much of what we know about Lobdell prior to the period she adapted a male identity comes from a short autobiography she published in 1855,

Narrative of the Female Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties N. Y. County. She worked at a district school for a time before marrying a friend of her family, George

Slater. After Lobdell gave birth to a daughter, the marriage fell apart and George moved out of town and Lobdell moved back to her parents’ house. Her parents were not well or well-off and she took to doing much of the farm work, including plowing and hunting for

1 Bambi Lyn Lobdell, A Man in All That the Name Implies Reclassification of Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell. Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric, 2007, 98-100. Other works discussing Lodbell include Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985); Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity,(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976). I have generally followed Bambi Lobdell's lead and used the gender pronoun which Lucy Ann/Joseph Lobdell would have used during each time period I am discussing. Thus, when speaking of Lobdell when she wore female clothing and called herself Lucy, I use she, and when he wore male clothing and called himself Joseph, I use he.

172 meat. Eventually, she determined that in order to earn money for her family she needed to leave the area and work in men’s clothes so that she could earn a man’s wage.2

During the mid-1850s, Lobdell moved across the Delaware River to Bethany,

Pennsylvania and opened a music school as Joseph Israel Lobdell. There he struck up a romance with one of his female students and the two were to be married. However, before that happened, his biological sex was discovered, causing an outrage in the community. Upon hearing that news, a group of young men gathered to tar and feather

Lobdell. Fearful that “some terrible outrage would be committed upon her in comparison to which the proposed tarring and father would be light,” likely lynching or rape, a community member warned Lobdell and he was able flee the area safely.3

By 1856, Lobdell had made his way to the Minnesota territory under the name

La-Roi Lobdell, where he worked maintaining land claims and hunting near Lake

Minnatonka before moving even further west into Meeker County the next year. During the summer of 1858, however, Lobdell's biological sex was again revealed. How this happened is unclear because Lobdell had lived with men in tight confines for much of his time in the territory without discovery. The account of his outing merely explains that

“Satan, with the aid of original sin, discovered and exposed her sex,” which suggests that some sort of sexual conduct was involved in the revelation. The county authorities arrested Lobdell and the prosecuting attorney made out a charge stating that, “Lobdell, being a woman, falsely personates a man, to the great scandal of the community, and

2 Bambi Lobdell, 26. Lucy Ann Lobdell, Narrative of the Female Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties N.Y. County (New York: Published for the Authoress, 1855), 16, 23-29 30-33.

3 Bambi Lobdell, 58. “The Man-Woman,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette, August 10, 1876, 1.

173 against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota.” However, the judge determined

Lobdell was not guilty of anything because there was nothing illegal about a woman dressing in pants. The ruling did not change the community’s reaction to the revelation and Lobdell became an outcast. Unable to find work, Lobdell became dependent upon the county for support. When he expressed his wish to return to New York, the county took the opportunity to rid itself of him and paid his way back east.4

Returning to New York, Lobdell lived for a time with her parents until 1860 when, as Lucy Ann, she turned to the Delaware County poorhouse for support. There she met Marie Louise Perry, a young women who had become destitute while searching for her absconding husband. The two became romantically attached and left the poorhouse together. Soon thereafter they traveled into Wayne County, Pennsylvania, where they were married by a justice of the peace and lived as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Israel Lobdell.

The couple did not attract attention or notoriety and for several years they lived with

Lobdell's family in Delaware County.5

By 1868, the couple had left Lobdell's family farm and taken up residence in the forests and mountains near Jackson Township in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. There they survived through a combination of hunting, gathering wild foods, and public charity while they lived as husband and wife in caves and other rudimentary shelters. Eventually, however, the community tired of the Lobdells' presence. As in the case of Mason Evans, the court authorities invoked their powers to arrest anyone “who follows no apparent

4 Bambi Lobdell, 69-81. A.C. Smith and Henry L. Smith, A Random Historical Sketch of Meeker County, Minnesota, from Its First Settlement to July 4th, 1876 (Litchfield, Minn: Belfoy & Joubert: 1877), 102-106.

5 “A queer married couple,” Warren (PA) Ledger, November 8, 1883. Bambi Lobdell, 105, 189.

174 labor, trade occupation or business, and who has no visible means of subsistence, and who fails to give any reasonable account of his residence, character and business” as a vagrant and place them in jail. The couple spent two weeks in jail, during which time

Lobdell was able to keep his biological sex a secret. After being released, the couple made their way a few miles north to Barrett Township, where they continued to live on wild foods and charity while Lobdell, who had long had a great religious enthusiasm, preached the gospel.6

The couple lived around Barrett for about a year until they were once again arrested on charges of vagrancy. While in jail, the authorities learned that Lobdell had family across the river in Long Eddy and made preparations to return the couple to that county. However, someone came to suspect that Lobdell might have been born female. A doctor was called for and he confirmed the suspicion. The authorities transported the couple to Long Eddy in hopes of placing with them with Lobdell's parents but learned that Lobdell's parents were already being supported by the county as they were both aged and his mother was insane. Thus, the couple was placed back into the Delaware County poorhouse in Delhi where they first met.7

Eventually freed from the poorhouse, the couple returned to the woods. During the winter they lived in a cave ten miles from Honesdale, while in the summer they wandered throughout Wayne and Monroe Counties in Pennsylvania. In August 1876,

6 “A Romance in Real Life,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette, August 22, 1871, 1. “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE,” New York Times, August 25, 1871, 5. David Derickson and W. M. Hall, Pennsylvania The Revised Statutes of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: B. Singerly, State printer: 1871), 149.

7 “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE,” New York Times.

175 Lobdell was back in Honesdale, arrested once again “out of common decency.8 While

Lobdell was incarcerated, Perry petitioned for his release and, despite harassment from the jailers and other spectators at the jail, visited her husband.9 By November, Lobdell was free and the couple was back roaming.10 After working for a time picking berries and winter green leaves, Lobdell was able to purchase a four-acre track of land from a German man who manufactured winter green oil from the leaves they gathered. The money for this purchase came from an unlikely source, George Slater. Lobdell and Slater had apparently never divorced and he had gone on to serve for and die in the Union army. His pension gave Lobdell sufficient funds to purchase the land. Perhaps for this reason, or to make the title more secure, Lobdell had the land put under the name Lucy Slater. Yet while making the deed, Lobdell was unwilling to hide the nature of his relationship with Perry. When asked how long he had been married, Lobdell replied, “thirteen years to this woman.”11

Having purchased land, Lobdell and Perry must have hoped they were now free from the fear that they might be arrested at any moment as vagrants and that they could enjoy their reclining years in peace.

In 1879, the New York Times and the National Police Gazette both falsely reported that Lobdell was dead.12 The following year, another newspaper article explained

8 “A Wild Woman's History,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette, August 27, 1876.

9 “Romantic Lunatics,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette, September 21, 1876.

10 “The Female Hunter,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette, November 28, 1876.

11 “Lucy Lobdell Again,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette, February 26, 1878. Bambi Lobdell, 136.

12 “A Curious Career,” National Police Gazette, October 25, 1878, 7. “DEATH OF A MODERN DIANA,” New York Times, October 7, 1879, 2. 176 these false reports as honest mistakes, since Lobdell had in fact wandered off from the farm one day and disappeared.13 A decomposed body was later found nearby, and Perry assumed it was Lobdell. Bambi Lobdell, however, claimed that the mistake was an attempt to separate Perry and Lobdell and end the couple’s notoriety. Bambi Lobdell stated that Joseph had a manic attack and went to live in the Delhi poorhouse. After being released from there, Lobdell returned to live with his brother, who was taking care of the daughter Lobdell had while married to Slater. Perry was not allowed to follow Lobdell into the poorhouse and was then told by the Lobdell family that Joseph had died. Perry was devastated and, after being taken back to her family's home in Massachusetts, she returned to wander the area where she and Lobdell had lived.14

By June of 1880, Lobdell's brother John had become unable or unwilling to care for him and made arrangements for him to be institutionalized by the state. John Lobdell testified that his “sister” was insane, stating,

She has a habit of dressing in men’s clothes. At times she has had spells when she imagines there are snakes in the room and… and at such times she tears her clothes and the bedding in the room. She becomes quarrelsome and unmanageable at times and threatens to burn the buildings and runs off in the woods alone.... I think her insanity was to some extent caused by excitement in religious matters.

A local physician concurred with John's assessment and testified that Joseph was insane.

Another witness, William W. Main, believed Lobdell was insane only because he wore

13 “An Idyl of Wild Life,” The Stevens Point Journal, November 6, 1880, 1.

14 Bambi Lobdell, 133, 136.

177 men’s clothes and “on other matters ha[d] heard her talk quite sensibly.” Other men from

the area who had long known Lobdell testified to his insanity, dwelling almost entirely on

his clothing and love of Perry.15 As a result of the inquest Lobdell was sent back to the

poorhouse and examined further by two doctors before being transferred to the Willard

Asylum. The reasons for his institutionalization, as stated on his certificate of lunacy,

were, “1st: She is uncontrollable, indecent, & immoral and insists on wearing male attire

calling herself a huntress. 2nd: She threatens the lives of her companions. 3rd: She does

herself violence.”16

Unlike other people inscribed with the figure of the Wild Man who entered the

American state asylum system, Lobdell did not vanish from the historical record once

behind hospital walls. In 1883, Dr. P.M. Wise, Assistant Physician of the Willard

Asylum for the Insane, published an article on Lobdell in the journal Alienist and

Neurologist entitled, “A Case of Sexual Perversion.” Lobdell’s place in the

historiography of sexuality comes largely from this article, which was one of the earliest

medical articles to discuss and pathologize same-sex intimacy and even used the term

“Lesbian love” to discuss their relationship.17

During the post-Civil War period, the state asylum systems in America grew

enormously and by 1880 mental hospitals held more than forty-one thousand people.

15 Excerpts from the Delaware County Court, Delhi, NY: In the matter of Lucy Ann [Lobdell] Slater a Supposed Lunatic, June 16, 1880. Available at: http://www.oneonta.edu/library/dailylife/family/lucytest1.html.

16 Bambi Lobdell, 138.

17 P. M. Wise, “Case of Sexual Perversion,” Alienist and neurologist: A quarterly journal of scientific, clinical and forensic psychiatry and neurology Vol. 4 No. 1 (1883): 87-91.

178 Much of that growth was the result of state governments, led by New York and

Pennsylvania, taking over the long-term care of the lower-class mentally ill. Such

individuals were transferred from county poorhouses to sparse custodial care asylums

like the Willard Asylum, which was one of the largest state asylums. While asylum

doctors continued to hope that such individuals might be cured by being removed from

the environments that “caused” their insanity, the primary function of such massive state

asylums was simply to remove the incurably insane from society. In previous decades the

long-term insane might move back and forth between the asylum and the poorhouse. In

the post-war period, these individuals, including people like Lobdell or Mason Evans

who might be seen as Wild Men, were institutionalized for the rest of their lives.18

Like other types of physicians, those who studied and treated mental illness in

post-Civil War America undertook a great investigation into the causes and treatments of

the disorders. They began to accumulate vast amounts of data from clinical observations

of patients, laboratory experiments, and analyses of brain matter. However, there were no

grand breakthroughs such as germ theory. Increasingly psychiatrists, as they began to call

themselves, came to be pessimistic about their ability to treat disease. Their only real

success was the systematic categorization of types of mental illness.19

Dr. P.M. Wise's article on Lobdell was part of that systematic effort to categorize

mental illnesses. Wise saw Lobdell's identification as a man and his desire for woman as

“a distressing mono-delusional form of insanity... a pathological condition and a peculiar

18 Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 120-122. Gerald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983,) 4-5, 13-17, 76-77, 107.

19 Gamwell and Tomes, 119-120.

179 manifestation of insanity.” While at the asylum, Lobdell suffered what Wise called

“repeated paroxysmal attacks of erotomania and exhilaration, without periodicity, followed by corresponding periods of mental and physical depression.” Wise also reported that Joseph was developing dementia and losing his ability to engage in coherent discourse. Struggling to develop a theory to explain Lobdell's condition, Wise wrote that

Lobdell was “the daughter of a lumberman living in the mountainous region of Delaware

Co., N. Y.” and “that she inherited an insane history from her mother’s antecedents.”

After Lobdell told Wise that “I may be a woman in one sense, but I have peculiar organs that make me more a man than a woman,” he examined her body looking for physical differences that might explain her condition, but was “unable to discover any abnormality of the genitals.” Wise could categorize Lobdell's insanity but he could not do much more than that.20

Most historians who have examined the story of Lobdell and Perry have been primarily concerned with understanding their sexual and gender identities and society’s reaction to those identities. There is no denying that Lobdell's transgression of gender norms was central to the interest he gathered both from local communities, civil authorities, the medical establishment and the national press. But as Bambi Lobdell points out, Joseph/Lucy Ann Lobdell's queer body inhabited a queer space: wilderness.21

20 Wise, 87-91.

21 Bambi Lobdell, 100, 117, 128. “Queer” refers to sexual and gender identity and expression that do not conform to heteronormative society. Judith Halberstam, in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1-20, introduces the idea of queer time and space, though in the context of thinking about post-modern geography. This framework is also useful for think about wilderness, in that wilderness in nineteenth-century America was by definition a non-productive and thus non-reproductive space. Therefore, what happened in the wilderness happened outside of the framework of the normative/heteronormative ordering of nineteenth-century America. 180 Lobdell may not have fit all the characteristics of a classic Wild Man or Wild

Woman, but many if not most who wrote about her interpreted her queerness as a type of wildness. What is more, people saw her and treated her in ways similar to how they might treat a Wild Man. The most obvious example of contemporaries considering

Lobdell as a Wild Man comes from the several newspaper articles and a book chapter that described Lobdell as a Wild Woman.”22 More important, however, are the numerous examples from contemporary newspapers that explained Lobdell's queer state as a product of the wilderness that he inhabited.

Almost all the accounts of Lobdell's life describe her upbringing in the

“Wilderness” of Delaware County and recount how she learned the skills of an outdoorsman. According to the New York Times, “She came to Basket Station (when it was but a primitive wilderness,) with her father and mother, when she was about ten years old. She was as wild as the deer that then roamed over the hills of Delaware county, and early learned to use the rifle.”23 Smith likewise emphasizes her wild youth and education: “From the time this child was old enough to walk she was a great favorite among the hardy woodchoppers and craftsman. They often took her off to the logging camps and kept her days at a time, and she early became inured to the hardships and privation of their life.”24 In a story entitled “An Idyl of a Wild Life,” the Stevens Point

22 A.C. Smith, 99.

23 “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE,” The New York Times.

24 “Wild Woman Story,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, July 27, 1876, 7. A.C. Smith, 99. Bambi Lobdell, 102.

181 (Wis.) Journal claimed, “Ann Slater had been brought up to hunting for a living, felt independent and took to the woods.” Another article went so far as to claim that she tracked and killed a panther at the age of twelve. Such accounts were, of course, gross exaggerations of Lobdell's youth, but they were critical components of the wild image that contemporaries inscribed upon her.25

The fictive youth in the wilderness that the newspaper created for Lobdell set the stage for their interpretations of Lobdell's subversion of gender roles and her “wild life in the upper Delaware valley wilderness.” Indeed, it is impossible to separate these two aspects of her wildness, her queerness and her inhabitation of the wilderness, in the popular presses' accounts of her life. Lobdell's gender identity was not simply that of a man, for she not only “rejected female” but she “assumed the garb of a hunter and trapper.” The National Police Gazette emphasized the contrast between Lobdell's perceived sex and his life in this way: “For eight years the unfortunate wife and mother roamed the woods of that section, making her home in the wilderness, where she erected rude cabins for her shelter... Her wild life was one of thrilling adventure and privation.”

One account even went so far as to suggest she was not simply an expert hunter but had

“killed [an] old bear with her hunting knife.”26 Like the Wild Man of European lore, the fictive Lobdell the hunter used power gleaned from the wilderness to kill the creatures of the forest in hand-to-hand combat.

For her contemporaries, Lobdell's queerness could be partially be explained by the wild life she led. As one article put it, for “the wild life she has led, and the hardships

25 Lucy Ann Lobdell, 30. Galveston Daily News. Steven's Point Journal.

26 National Police Gazette. “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE,” New York Times. 182 she has endured, have driven every feminine feature from her face.” For those who told her story, Lobdell's youth in the wilderness set the stage for Lobdell's later wild life living in the wilderness as a man. The hardship of the wild life further stripped away Lobdell's feminine characteristics and set the stage for an even queerer future.

When newspapermen described the married life of Lobdell and Perry, they emphasized that it took place in the wilderness. The New York Times depicted Lobdell's life with Perry as essentially that of Wild People, “living in the woods, sleeping in caves...but never would tell whence they came, or why they lived in that wild manner.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concurred, writing, “For two years these vagrants wandered about that part of the country, living in caves and subsisting on roots, berries and game killed by the man.” The Galveston Daily News described how, after the couple left the poorhouse, they “returned to their wild life, and for five years lived in the mountains of Wayne County.” The Port Jervis Evening Gazette emphasizes that when

Perry visited Lobdell in jail, she brought him wild apples and berries to eat. Several accounts added a further element to Lobdell's wildness, reporting that the couple had a bear for a companion, and one paper went so far as to write that Lobdell believed “that the bear had been sent him by the Lord to guard him in the wilderness.” All those who saw Lobdell as queer saw his wildness as an essential element of that queerness.27

This bundling of Lobdell’s queerness with his Wildness was consistent with late nineteenth-century rhetoric concerning civilization and same-sex intimacy. Most nineteenth-century scientists, doctors, and social thinkers in both America and Europe

27 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The Galveston Daily News. “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE,” New York Times. “Romantic Lunatics,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette.

183 saw sexual differentiation as key markers of progress and development. Early sexologists saw any type of sexual or gender identity that blurred the lines between male and female as an example of either arrested development or degeneracy. These scholars and physicians saw homosexual behavior as a trait of primitive people or the lower classes.28

Lobdell's dress and manner of life as a hunter and then as Wild Man-like figure who lived in caves conformed to Americans’ expectations about those who blurred gender lines.

People who exaggerated the primitiveness and wildness of Lobdell’s early years were likewise guided by their conviction that someone who crossed gender lines or professed same-sex desire must be the most primitive of people. Indeed, Perry, who always identified herself as female and as Lobdell's wife, was often described as a well-bred, refined and educated woman.29

Much of the violence that Lobdell experienced from both the community and the state was undoubtedly a result of his identity as a man, but his wildness was also a critical component of the violence. In several instances he was arrested simply because of his wild life. While Lobdell and Perry were living in Monroe County in 1871, “[f]inally, the people grew tired of their presence, and they were arrested as vagrants and lodged in the jail at Stroudsburg,” only to be released a few weeks later. It was only after they were arrested a second time, again on the basis of their wild life and not their sexual or gender identities, that Lobdell's biological sex was revealed. The couple was certainly an object

28 Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 158-160. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 46, 52, 77, 87. Gamwell and Tomes, 162-164. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25.

29 “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE,” New York Times. “DEATH OF A MODERN DIANA,” New York Times, October 7, 1879. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Galveston Daily News. National Police Gazette. Warren Ledger. Wise, 89.

184 of ridicule because of their relationship, and one cannot underestimate the hardship they

faced. But they did not always face complete hostility based on their relationship. The

couple was able to buy a farm and live there for a time, even while publicly declaring

themselves husband and wife. Thus, the state persecution they faced did stem in part from

their wildness, not just their queerness. 30

One of the defining characteristics of the Wild Man figure is his muteness. That

trait also held true for almost of the individuals inscribed with the image of the Wild Man

and suffered for it. The Wild African, Mason Evans, and the Wild Woman of the Wachita

are all silent in the historic record. This is not true for Lobdell. As a young person,

Lobdell wrote a short autobiography, Narrative of Lucy Ann Lobdell, the Female Hunter

of Delaware and Sullivan Counties, N. Y., which she published in 1855. While the

account only covers the earliest years of her life, ending with her full-time adoption of

male dress, it does provide a unique voice of an individual who chose to roam the woods

and faced state persecution for it.

Despite its title, Lobdell's autobiography is not so much an account of her time as

a hunter but rather of the circumstances that led her to take up that life. The first part of

the autobiography is devoted to her romances with several male suitors, her time at

school, her life married to Slater, and the circumstances under which he left her. Only the

second part dwells upon the choices she made that would gain her such fame and

notoriety, her decision first to hunt and dress like a man and then to adopt a full

masculine identity.

30 “EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE.” “Romance in Real Life,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette. “A Wild Woman's History,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette. “Lucy Lobdell Again,” Port Jervis Evening Gazette. 185 In her autobiography, Lobdell presents a very pragmatic picture of her motivation to take up the role of female hunter. She had learned to shoot in her childhood while protecting the poultry that she raised to pay for her school fees from hawks, weasels, minks and rats. When Lobdell returned to her family, she “used to feel sorry to see my poor father so lame, and to hear him ask me to shoot him some deer. I at length put on a hunting-suit I had prepared, and away I started in pursuit of some meat.” Hunting was an economic necessity for the family, just like plowing and other heavy manual labor that

Lobdell performed. Indeed, in the few hunting stories that Lobdell includes, she promises a second volume that would contain more and emphasizes the difficulty and labor of hunting. Lobdell killed her first deer after hunting for a day without success and “offered up a prayer of thankfulness to my Heavenly Father that he had not forgot my toil from day to day.” Her later hunting exploits were equally difficult, resulting in her becoming lost, frightened or soaking wet.31

Pragmatism underlines part of Lobdell's explanation for why she came to adopt a male identity. After a newspaper story of her hunting appeared in 1853, Slater wrote to

Lobdell and proposed that they live together again. Reading his letter, Lobdell made up her mind to leave her parents’ home. In part, she wanted to avoid Slater. More importantly, however, Lobdell wrote,

I made up my mind to dress in men's attire to seek labor, as I was used to men's work. And as I might work harder at house-work, and get only a dollar per week, and I was capable of doing men's work and getting men's wages, I resolved to try... to get work away among strangers.

31 Lucy Ann Lobdell, 30-31. 186 Thus, on one level, the simply necessity of avoiding her husband and earning a wage that could provide for herself and her family drove Lobdell to adapt the identity she would hold for years.

Yet clearly there was something about roaming the woods as a hunter or dressing in men's clothing and doing men's work that appealed to Lobdell beyond mere practicality. Lobdell wrote, “I used often to go hunting to drive care and sorrow away; for when I was upon the mountain's brow, chasing the wild deer, it was exciting for me.” She clearly took pride in her skill, stating she had “some hundred little hunting adventures.”

While she claimed she lacked space to include those adventures, she transcribed the newspaper story about her as a hunter that recounted her doing the work of both a man and a woman and of her ability to hit a “Bull's eye from some three hundred feet away.”

Thus, the figure of the female hunter, the image by which Lobdell was most often described, was not merely something others saw in her but something she embraced. She adopted her wilderness life not because it was the only place she could go but because it was a life she wanted. She knew of the troubles that she would face, stating that while leaving home she “did not dare to tell [my] folks my calculation, for I knew that they would say I was crazy, and tie me up perhaps.”32 But she embraced her queer and wild life in the wilderness anyway.

Lobdell was extraordinary and unique, and she cannot truly speak for all those who, like her, found a life in being wild and wandering the wilderness. But she was the only person inscribed with the figure of the Wild Man whose voice survives. Thus we are forced to let her speak for those who are silent. The image of the Wild Man is that of an

32 Lucy Ann Lobdell, 36-38, 41. 187 individual overcome and transformed by the power of wild nature. It is an unwilled-for event, a captivity on the part of nature that rendered the normal man or woman into an inhuman beast. What Lobdell tells us is that she was wild and that she lived outside and beyond the rules and orders of society. But she was not a captive of nature and she was not its victim. Instead, she was an individual in search of space and freedom to live her life as she wished. She was not taken over by the wilderness but entered willingly into the protective forest and mountains of the Delaware River area.

One can imagine that this held true for all those inscribed with the image of the

Wild Man. Certainly, life in the bottoms of the Navidad River was better than slaughter or enslavement at the hands of Anglo-Texan settlers. Certainly, Mason Evans seemed more content to wander where he could, to steal chickens, and to beg for a place by the fire for one night and leave the next, than to sit in the poorhouse or be chained in a cabin.

We do not know if they, or the hundreds of other men and woman who were seen as wild, saw the forest and the mountain like Lobdell did. But certainly, like Lobdell, they lacked any other place they could go and still be wild or free.

188

CHAPTER SIX: The Evolution the American Wild Man.

It was the particular and local circumstances of a community that resulted in a community seeing Wild Men. Those localized circumstances shaped the stories that

Americans told about the Wild Men they saw and what actions they took towards individuals they inscribed with those stories. Most Americans never saw a Wild Man or came to believe that the wild spaces around their community were inhabited by a human being enveloped by the transformative power of the natural world because the particular circumstances of their community did not lead them to that belief. Yet despite the localness of Wild Men sightings, the American belief in Wild Men was a national phenomenon. While Americans did not see Wild Men everywhere, across the continent they did have the opportunity to read about Wild Men in newspapers and other printed media. Thus, even the vast majority of Americans who never encountered a Wild Man participated in the American Wild Man tradition.

The American belief in Wild Men must also be considered a national phenomenon because it was shaped by national forces. American Wild Man stories, stories set in America in which Americans are transformed into Wild Men, rose to prominence in the late 1840s and early 1850s. As we have seen, prior to that period there were republications of European Wild Man stories in newspapers and almanacs. There were also early news stories about Wild Man like figures in America, some of which

189 newspapers referred to as Wild Men, some of which they did not. But these stories lacked the coherence and prominence that the figure would later develop. The classic American

Wild Men stories, like that of the Wild Man of Arkansas or the Wild People of the

Navidad, only appeared in the late 1840s. They were soon followed by hundreds like them for the remainder of the century. This national rise to prominence can only be explained by some of the significant changes that were taking place in American society during those decades, including the market revolution, the democratization of knowledge, and U.S. territorial expansion. For the rest of the century, the figure retained its place in

American culture.

The rise of evolutionary thinking in the post-bellum period only served to further solidify the figure’s place in American culture. In America, the dominant form of evolutionary thought was not Darwinian evolution by natural selection but rather Neo-

Lamarckian evolution in which organisms adapted themselves to their environment during their lifetime and these acquired characteristics were passed on to their descendents. Indeed, Neo-Lamarckianism was but a new form of the American environmentalism thinking. As long as Americans believed that the environment could shape the human body and human nature, they would believe in Wild Men.

The Rise of the American Wild Man

The earliest Wild Man stories from American newspapers give a good indication of the variety of creatures that Americans referred to as Wild Men prior to the late 1840s.

The Mississippi Herald & Natchez Gazette reported that a “Wild White Man” had taken up residence in the woods of a plantation. After several attempts, the plantation owner

190 was able to remove the Wild Man, whom he described as naked with a great long beard.1

In 1831, the Providence Patriot, Columbian Phoenix reported a Wild Man in New

Hampshire, a naked insane man with prodigious strength.2 The Kentucky Gazette published a letter from a Patrick C. Florunoy who, while traveling in central Kentucky, spotted a “being whose strangeness of visage inspired me with the most horrible sensations.” The creature was a Wild Man of sorts, though it had a long tail, one eye and was covered with “hair and feathers.”3 The New England Weekly Review published a work of fiction entitled A Legend of the North: The Wild Man, which told the story of a man who abandoned civilization for the northern wilderness after being scorned by love.

He then lived in isolation, sporting a big beard and the skin of wild animals as clothing.4

The Boston Times published a supposed first-hand account of a Wild Man captured near the Mississippi River in 1839. The creature was “in the form of a man, but covered in long hair,” and was eight or nine feet tall. The reporter described the creature as being more like a beast than a man, with a “hide like a cow, long black head hair and finer brown hair on his body.” The creature’s captors thought he was of the Orang-Outang species, but the reporter contended he was a “wild animal, something resembling a man.”5 None of these stories depict the classic Wild Man figure, as even the last account does not describe the creature as once being human, yet all contain some elements of the figure: wilderness abode, nakedness, hairiness, great strength or unrequited love.

1 “Wild White Man,” Mississippi Herald & Natchez Gazette, June 3, 1806, 1.

2 Providence Patriot, Columbian Phoenix, August 3, 1831.

3 Republished in Huron (Norwalk, Ohio) Reflector, February 15, 1831, 4.

4 New England Weekly Review, Issue 148 (January 10): 1831.

5 Republished in “Wild Man of the Woods,” Jonesborough Tennessee Whig, October 17, 1839, 1. 191 It was in the late 1840s and early 1850s, however, that the classic American Wild

Man stories, generally featuring a white human being transformed into a creature covered with hair, appeared in abundance in the American press and were widely circulated throughout the country. Two of the most prominent of these early stories were that of the

Wild Man of Arkansas and the Wild People of the Navidad. But literally hundreds of others soon followed, making appearances in newspapers from across the county for nearly the next hundred years.

At first glance, the increased prominence of the Wild Man figure in the 1840s can be explained away as merely an artifact of this project’s research methodology. American

Wild Men narratives are most visible to the historian when they were recorded by newspapers that were subsequently digitized. While it is possible to find additional archival material that expands and enriches the historic records of a particular Wild Man narrative, such material can most often be found by working back from a newspaper story. A local community might very well have created a Wild Man narrative, a narrative that was recorded in personal papers or a court document. Absent a newspaper account of that story, however, it would be invisible to history.

Thus one might surmise that it was the dramatic growth of the newspaper industry in the 1840s that resulted in the appearance of a profusion of Wild Man narratives during the same time period. Between 1783 and 1833, the American press grew from some thirty-five newspapers to around twelve hundred.6 Even more dramatic changes soon followed. The New York Sun, a cheap newspaper aimed at the urban working class, began publishing in 1833 and was the first outpost of what became known as the penny press.

6 Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783-1833 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996), 156. 192 Scores of imitators followed, first in the major eastern cities but then quickly across the nation. Perhaps even more important for understanding the proliferation of Wild Man stories was the development of a new national communications infrastructure that used rail, telegraph, improved mail service and organizations like the Associated Press to compile and disseminate news stories across the county. A Wild Man story from one state might rapidly appear in papers across the nation. By the late 1840s there were not only more newspapers in print, but they were sharing more stories, at a faster rate, over a wider area.

But the Wild Man's increased prominence in American society was more than just the result of an increase in the number of pages of newspaper print and the more rapid circulation of newspaper stories. Rather, the changes in American society itself that caused the rise of the penny press were behind the Wild Man’s new prominence: the combination of the market revolution, the democratization of knowledge, and westward imperialism. Thus Wild Men become more prominent in these decades both because of the social, economic and cultural changes which were taking place and because these changes resulted in a greater number of newspapers and other media which could reflect these changes.

This cultural transformation is readily apparent in the content of these newspapers. The new American media catered to a much wider audience, an audience that was not just interested in political and commercial news, but rather news as entertainment. This democratization of the news resulted in newspapers carrying unusual and sensational stories. Many of these stories were drawn from local court dockets, while others were compiled from news services and paper exchanges. In such an environment,

193 papers quickly picked up Wild Man stories across the nation.7 Not only were there more papers but also their content had changed such that they were more likely to include stories about Wild Men.

The market revolution of the antebellum period not only changed the newspaper industry but also resulted in the flowering of a host of other types of media, such as journals, books, museums, and traveling exhibitions. This profusion of new types of media, available to much wider segments of American society, served to undermine social hierarchies based on monopolies of knowledge.8 Previously, information was only available to a small elite of clergy, wealthy merchants, lawyers, doctors and planters.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this was the rise of sectarian medicine, such as the eclectic and homeopathic schools of medicine after 1820. In fact, many states ceased effective licensing of physicians by the 1830s. Domestic medicine books that argued that every man could be his own physician with common sense and a little guidance also flourished.9

The 1830s and 1840s saw the diffusion of scientific knowledge more generally to less educated levels of American society. Much of this diffusion came through the popular press, which emphasized the marvelous aspects of science. This meant the inclusion of much pseudo-science, and even folklore disguised as science, like sea

7 William Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833-1865 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999), 3.

8 Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 276-277.

9 John Harley Warner, “Medical Sectarianism, Therapeutic Conflict, and the Shaping of Orthodox Professional Identity in Antebellum American Medicine,” in Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, 1750-1850, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 234-260. John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 69-83.

194 serpents or animal magnetism. Newspaper editors or even laymen with no credentials felt empowered to comment on and evaluate science. Subjects that were once the domain of experts, such as biology, medicine or philosophy, were now open to the investigation of lay people.10

The growth of the newspaper industry and the democratization of information was a small part of a much larger market revolution that transformed antebellum America.

Yet even as market forces transformed American society, some aspects of pre-market revolution American culture survived. Much of the non-market ethos found a new manifestation in evangelical Christianity. In other places it was co-opted by market forces in the festive, vaudeville culture.11

By the 1840s there was a general revival of beliefs that were very much contrary to the values of the market and even the enlightenment. As early as the eighteenth century, the “folkloreization of magic,” as historian Jon Butler calls it, had confined supernatural cosmology to the marginal segments of American society.12 But this confinement was not complete and interminable. Almanacs continued to carry astrological information. Americans continued to hunt for treasure through supernatural means, plant crops according to the cycles of the moon, and have sex in the fields to ensure their fertility.13 By the 1840s a veritable supernatural economy of fortunetellers,

10 Donald Zochert, "Science and the Common Man in Antebellum America," in Science in America since 1820, edited by Nathan Reingold (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), 16-33.

11 Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 19. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 30.

12 Butler, 83.

13 Valencius, 210-211. Butler, 226-235. Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic's Supernatural Economy: 195 dowsers, spiritualists, folk healers, and mesmerists flourished. These years also saw the

development of an interest in what was known at the time as “Antiquarian lore.”

Prompted by the transformation of American society and the disappearance of the early

way of life, scholars from major eastern cities, particularly New York and Philadelphia,

became interested in German folkways and the stories of early settlers and Native

Americans.14 Such a cultural environment was one in which the Wild Man found a ready

home. Thus both the market revolution, through its democratization of knowledge, and

the cultural reaction to it helped set the stage for the rise of Wild Man narratives in the

1840s.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this shift was the exhibition of natural

curiosities that were once an essential part of the development of science, both prior to

and during the enlightenment. While exhibitions were never limited to elites and scholars,

in early modern England, for example, taverns were the location of the exhibition of

human oddities, and taverns were dominated by the elite.15 In early America, such

collections of natural curiosities were either in private hands or in collections, such as the

Philadelphia Museum of Charles Wilson Peale, that were oriented towards scholars.

During the antebellum period and the democratization of American life, this began to

Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast, 1780-1830,” American Quarterly Vol. 38 No. 1 (Spring, 1986): 6-34.

14 Lewis Perry, Boats against the Current: American Culture between Revolution and Modernity, 1820- 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 59-60.

15 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 6, 70, and 77.

196 change and museums and collections became locations not only of scholarship but of

entertainment as well.16

By the mid-point of the nineteenth century, large museums and well-financed

showmen came to dominate the exhibition of human curiosities. These collections of

human oddities took on the name “freak shows” when stationary and “sideshows” when

part of a circus. Throughout the nineteenth century, Wild Men or Wild Men like figures

were exhibited in both small venues and major museums and circuses.17 While these

exhibitions were largely of either Orang-Outang figures or savage Wild Men types, they

helped to popularize the term and figure more generally.

P.T. Barnum was one of the most important and influential exhibitors of Wild

Men in major museums, shows and circuses. Barnum began exhibiting Wild Men in 1840

when he exhibited an Orang-Outang named Mademoiselle Fanny, “the connecting link

between man and brute.” In 1846, while touring in London, Barnum arranged for the

physically deformed actor Harvey Leach to play “The Wild Man of the Prairies.” Barnum

advertised him as “entirely covered, except the face and hands, with long flowing hair”

and as the link between man and Orang-Outang. According to Barnum’s autobiography,

the story of the Wild Man of the Prairies was that he was a "strange animal" captured in

the mountains of Mexico or California who appeared like a "wild man" but could not

16 Neil Harris, Humbug; The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), 33.

17 Harris, 3, 27-29, 260. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies. Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Philip McGowan, American Carnival: Seeing and Reading American Culture (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2001). Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

197 speak, although “it manifested much intelligence.” Unfortunately for Barnum, the

London public was not fooled, as they recognized Leach from other stage performances.18

Barnum would never again exhibit a Wild Man who was from North America, either in London or the United States. In fact, the Wild Man of the Prairies appears to have been the last Wild Man claimed by a major showman to have been from the United

States. Though two different newspaper stories from 1883 mention the possibility that

Barnum might exhibit a Wild Man from Kentucky, it does not appear that the act ever went forward.19 The Wild Man acts that Barnum did promote, like almost all other nineteenth- and twentieth-century major metropolitan Wild Men acts, were of savage

Wild Men, that is, individuals who were distant culturally, racially and geographically from middle class white Americans. This was certainly the case in February of 1860, when Barnum made another attempt at a Wild Man act, this time at his American

Museum. In the act entitled “What Is It?,” William Henry Johnson, an African American, played a “missing link” between man and beast who had been captured in Africa while living in a tree.20

Barnum was not able to become involved in the most famous of Wild Men acts, that of Waino and Plutano, the Wild Men of Borneo, until 1880. In actuality two developmentally disabled brothers, Hiram and Barney Davis from Ohio, these Wild Men

18 Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum: written by himself (Redfield, 1855), 346.

19 Decauter Daily Republic, April 11, 1883. “Kentucky Wild Man A Man Covered with Thick Hair, Who Refuses Bread, but Voraciously Eats Meat and Relishes Fruit,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 19, 1883, 7.

20 Bogdan, 139.

198 began their careers in 1852 when a showman offered their family a considerable sum of money to exhibit them. By 1860, they appeared in handbills as the “Astonishing Wild

Men from the Island Borneo.” Their act, which set the standard for most future acts both in terms of name and performance, featured the brothers engaging in acts of strength and making strange noises. As they grew older, their exhibitors explained that their placid behavior was the result of their captivity but still insisted they were “two things of beast and human form” caught on the island of Borneo.21 Their exhibitors claimed that their condition was partly environmental, their savagery originating from inhabitation of foreign lands and their tameness from their long exposure to American civilization, but that their condition was also inherent to their racial characteristics as non-Europeans. The meaning of these savage Wild Men was very different from that of the feral Wild Men, which are the main focus of this project, though they may have helped popularize the terms and the image. Their popular appeal lay in the way in which they performed a racial otherness against which white men could articulate both their normality and their superiority.22

Yet as the failed exhibition of the Wild Man in London showed, audiences were aware that fraud and deception were an element of Barnum and his followers’ displays and performances. Indeed, the 1830s and 1840s saw the birth not only of the freak show

21 Bogdan 121-127. Words Dedicated to "Wano" and "Plutano," the Wild Men of Borneo (S.l: s.n, 1800s). Col. Wood's Great Museum (Chicago). Come and See Nature's Wonders: The Wild Men of Borneo, Now Holding Their Levees to the Curious in the Various Towns and Cities of the Country (Green Bay: Green Bay Advocate, 1880).

22 As discussed in the introduction, the literature on savage-type Wild Men is extensive. See McGowan; Bederman; Adams; Thomson; Frost. Thomas Richard Fahy, Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume Phillips, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (Melbourne: Bookman, 1993).

199 and museums as entertainment but of a whole host of hoaxes and frauds. One of the earliest and perhaps most celebrated was the great moon hoax, which appeared in the

New York Sun during the summer of 1835. The articles, which the Sun claimed to be republished from a Scottish scientific journal, gave detailed description of life on the moon as observed through a powerful telescope. The six fantastic reports of unicorns and winged men drove the Sun’s circulation to new heights, until after several weeks they were revealed to be a hoax. Similar hoaxes soon followed in other papers, including several written by Edgar Allan Poe.23

Historians have debated why these decades saw a profusion of what was called humbug. Neil Harris argues that the appeal of Barnum’s and others’ hoaxes lay in allowing the populace to examine them, and in doing so to uncover the truth for themselves. They were paying to engage in contests of wits with the presenter in which they were empowered to evaluate the truth of an object and declare it humbug. Historian

James Cook seeks to complicate this notion by arguing that humbuggery was much more about the irresolvable nature of the truth in an increasingly complex world.24

Either of these arguments may help explain why newspapers across the country republished countless stories about Wild Men. Indeed, two of the most common elements of a Wild Man newspaper story were assertions of the story’s authenticity and speculation regarding the origins of the creature. For example, the original Wild Man of

Arkansas story included both the “various conjectures” regarding the creature’s origins

23 Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876 (New York: Knopf, 1987), 117. Huntzicker, 24-26. Harris, 68-70.

24 Harris, 74-78. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

200 and the assertion that the stories had been “well authenticated.” These assertions invited readers to make their own judgments on the authenticity of the account and to assess the various theories of the creature’s origins. As Harris argues, the stories place the public in the position of determining their validity. Indeed, in some cases the story was resolved with the revelation that the Wild Man was a humbug, while in others newspaper editors who republished Wild Man stories would interject their own humorous takes. For example, in one article the New York Times remarked that the Wild Man was capable of

“changing his sex” and “thinks nothing of being seen simultaneously at points hundreds of miles apart.”25

While newspaper editors may have been skeptical of the Wild Man stories they published, and many cases even fabricated the stories, the stories’ dubious nature did not limit their impact on those who believed in them. There is little to be found about the newspaper editors who made up Wild Man stories, or their motivations for doing so. One example, however, was H.L. Mencken, who in the autobiography of his time in the newspaper industry wrote about inventing a Wild Man story. Sometime around 1903,

Mencken was working as the city editor for the Baltimore Sunpaper. Finding that

Sundays were very slow news nights, he began to invite items for publication. According to Mencken, he published a story of a Wild Man in the woods north of the city that he invented with the help of a local police lieutenant. As a result, other police officers “took him quite seriously and hunted him with loud shots and frequent discharges of their pistols. Before the day was over they had roped and brought in at least a dozen poor bums.” The following week, Mencken published a story that resulted in an “alarmed

25 “What is it?,” New York Times, April 26, 1871, 4.

201 magistrate” sentencing a “half-wit stranger” to six months in the house of corrections.26

Mencken perpetuated a hoax in order to fill newspaper space and provide for his own amusement, but his story was taken seriously by the authorities and resulted in the arrest of several men and the imprisonment of one. Thus, even when a Wild Man story was written as a joke, those who were not in on the joke often took it seriously.

A more humorous but equally illuminating Wild Man hoax that appeared in newspapers regarded the romance between Moses Evans27 and the Wild Woman of the

Navidad.28 Evans was a surveyor and guide famous in Texas for his skills as a frontiersman as well as his eccentric behavior, red hair, rattlesnake vest, and interest in

“mister ladies.”29 Because of these characteristics, and the prolonged time he spent in the field, Texans referred to Evans as the “Wild Man of the Woods.” In the summer of 1850, during the height of the fervor over the Wild People of the Navidad, someone placed a series of romantic poems and letters in Texas newspapers that purported to reveal the romance between the Wild Woman of the Navidad and Evans. The letters and poems, supposedly written by the “mister ladies,” as Evans was illiterate, tell of Evans’ attempt to woo the Wild Woman and bring her back to civilization and the Wild Woman’s efforts

26 H. L. Mencken, Newspaper Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1899-1906 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 136-138.

27 To make matters confusing, although this Moses Evans shared a named with Mason Evans’ brother (see Chapter Four), the two were not related.

28 See Chapter One.

29 Perhaps as reference to either those who engaged in homosexual activity or cross dressed.

202 to get him to join her in her “camp in the named swamp” away from the “mister ladies so charming” and “society’s turmoil and strife.”30

But that someone saw Wild Man stories as hoaxes or tall tales does not mean that they were meaningless or that the fears the stories embodied regarding the vulnerability of human nature and the human body to the natural world should be dismissed. The Wild

Man was an object of humor because he represented very real concerns and fears about the effects of the natural world on the human body. Those who have studied the popularity of hoaxes, practical jokes and tall tales in antebellum American culture argue that their popularity stemmed from the ways in which they masked very real fears.

These types of humor worked by presenting exaggerated versions of preexisting societal concerns that, upon the revelation or realization that the exaggeration was false, served to obscure the underlining concern. Hoaxes, such as Barnum's exhibits or the New

York Sun’s moon hoax, drew interest became they were depictions of something new and wonderful. The unmasking of the hoax simplifies the world since it shows that new and wonderful things are not real but rather mere lies. The practical joke works the same way.

The joke introduces the victim to dangers only to reveal the danger is non-existent. In so doing, the joke obscures the underlining dangers of life that remain. Thus, such jokes are particularly popular in locations or among professions that are already dangerous.31

It is the western tall tale, perhaps the quintessential American genre of the nineteenth century, that best embodies this phenomenon. These stories come from

30 Swante Palm, “The Wild Man of the Woods,” in A Texas Scrap-Book: Made Up of the History, Biography, and Miscellany of Texas and Its People, ed. D. W. Baker (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co, 1875), 361-365.

31 Richard Volney Chase, Herman Melville, A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan Co, 1949), 76-80.

203 communities and individuals that were exposed to all dangers of the frontier life,

including wild animals, Native Americans, violent white Americans, diseases,

agricultural problems and poor economies. The tall tales take the horrific conditions of

frontier life and transforms them into a fantasy. Telling or even enjoying boastful tales of

violence or extreme natural conditions was meant to claim ownership over the danger. By

celebrating and exaggerating the harshness of frontier life, the tall tales mask its impact.

To truly understand a tall tale, the listener had to have experienced the harshness and

violence that spawned them and thus both the reality and the limits of the environment

that created them.32

The market revolution was not the only profound change taking place in the

United States during this period. The 1840s were the greatest period of territorial

expansion in the United States, an expansion that brought Americans into contact with

new peoples and new environments. In 1845, the United States annexed the Republic of

Texas; in 1846, the Oregon treaty resolved the disputed border with Great Britain; and in

1848, following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States took control of what

is now the southwestern United States and California. Within four years, the United

States territory grew from almost 1.8 million square miles to just under three million.

Moreover, these new lands contained peoples and climates very different from anything

Americans had experienced before.

32 Elliott J. Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch": The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” The American Historical Review Vol. 90 No. 1 (February, 1985), 18-43. Henry B. Wenham, "In the Name of Wonder: The Emergence of Tall Narrative in American Writing," American Quarterly (June 1989): 281-30. Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1975). Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931). 204 Furthermore, the technological and economic changes of this period brought new lands and new peoples closer to Euro-Americans. The Mexican American War was the first war extensively covered by the national press. The penny press, telegraphs, pony express, and the newly created Associated Press all combined to bring accounts of the war and the region over which it was fought to the American people. This war coverage redefined the west in the American imagination. Americans transformed their understanding of Texans from people held in low esteem to a heroic, and quintessentially

American, people. Following the war, news coverage of the west helped to bind the nation together. Newspapers depicted the new territory as harsh and challenging but also pointed out the many opportunities that could be found there. Yet even as Americans incorporated these new territories into the nation, they expressed anxieties about what that meant to the national character and destiny. Many Americans saw Mexicans as a degenerate race and worried about what the inclusion of former Mexican territories would mean for the United States, while others saw the possibilities of redeeming the

Mexican people. Still others expressed more general concerns about national expansion and the ability of the nation to function as it grew and incorporated new territories.33 It is thus unsurprising that during a period which saw both new interest in the southwestern frontier and new concerns about what expansion into these territories meant that Wild

Man stories from these regions became increasingly popular. While in the post-Civil War period Wild Man narratives emerged from as far east as Pennsylvania, Connecticut,

33 Robert Walter Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 97-101. Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 3.

205 Vermont and New York, during the first decades of the figure’s revival they seemed to embody American fears about the new lands of Texas, the Indian territory, and other frontiers newly incorporated into the nation.

It was the danger of these new lands, the possibility of surrendering to the natural world and becoming incorporated into it, that was the ultimate genesis of the figure of the

Wild Man in American culture. As Euro-Americans settled into new territories, they faced the question of what that new land would mean for them and their identity. The story of Euro-American expansion across the American continent is often depicted either as a triumphal march of progress or as an unstoppable wave of conquest and destruction.

But for the Euro-Americans who took part in such an expansion, their survival and prosperity was not inevitable. The environment in which Americans built their community did not vanish. They might cut down trees, kill wildlife, and plant crops, but their dominion over nature was never complete. There always remained a wild space, one beyond the town and past the fields, in a swamp or mountain or forest where a human being was powerless. There always existed the possibility that Euro-Americans might fail to build and sustain a Euro-American community, that wilderness might reclaim the land.

The Wild Man figure was a manifestation of that fear, the possibility that one day it would be the wilderness in triumph and man would be naught but a beast. It was not a fear, however, that was confined to the frontier or the American west. Across the continent, Americans saw Wild Men because on a daily basis they felt the power of wild nature over their lives and wondered how humanity could sustain itself against its awesome power.

206 Yet these profound changes in American society can only explain why Americans came to delight in reading, seeing and thinking about Wild Men in newspapers, novels or exhibitions. They can help explain the national popularity of the figure, the reasons why it resonated with the national consciousness, and why newspaper editors printed countless

Wild Man stories. But the Wild Man stories did not inhabit some abstract consciousness.

They existed on more than just the printed page. The news media may have disseminated

Wild Man stories, but it did not create them. Before a Wild Man appeared in the newspapers, someone had to see one and believe that the very landscape Americans inhabited was capable of transforming a man into a beast. Environmentalist interpretations of the human body and human nature were the essential cosmological underpinnings of the belief in the Wild Man. As we have seen, the transformation of

American medicine, particularly the decline in medical specificity and the rise of germ theory in the decades following the Civil War, served to weaken environmentalist medicine. These changes in the medical understanding of the human/environment relationship were, by the end of the century, accompanied by an equally profound attack on environmentalism, the rise of hereditarian explanations for human nature.

Evolution and the American Wild Man

Americans saw Wild Men because they believed in a cosmology in which species were not fixed and the body was permeable to the environment. Religion, science, folk- belief, in fact all forms of knowledge about the universe and the ways it worked, informed and shaped this cosmology. The Wild Man figure rose to prominence in

American culture in the 1840s as the democratization of early scientific knowledge reshaped many people’s cosmology to make Wild People possible or even expected. Any

207 changes in that cosmology would, in due course, affect the belief in Wild Men. Perhaps more than any other idea, the dissemination and popularization of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection would seem likely to reshape American's cosmology in ways that would impact the American belief in Wild Men. Darwinism had the potential to undermine the Wild Man figure in critical ways, for it posited that rather than the environment changing the individual, natural selection changed the species.

Yet the years following the publication and popular dissemination of Darwin's On the Origins of Species and The Decent of Man did not see a decline in the prominence of the figure. Americans continued to see Wild Men in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s and even the early decades of the new century. Indeed, Americans took Darwin's works as proof of the possibility of Wild Men, and even more remarkably, they took Wild Men as proof of

Darwin's theory. To understand this paradox it is necessary to follow the lead of historian of evolution Peter J. Bowler, who argues that Darwin's publication of On the Origin of

Species was the spark of a “Non-Darwinian Revolution” and it was not until the modern evolutionary synthesis of natural selection and Mendelian genetics developed in the

1920s and 1930s that a truly Darwinian paradigm shift took place. Prior to the modern synthesis, not only did most Americans not understand the theory of evolution by natural selection, but also most American scholars rejected natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism. Instead, most American evolutionary theorists, biologists, physicians, and social scientists believed in far more teleological ideas such as Neo-Lamarckism, evolution by the inheritance of characteristics acquired by the organism during its

208 lifetime as it adapted to its environment, a mechanism that happened to be far more amenable to the Wild Man existence.34

Early in 1876 a headline appeared in the New York Herald that proclaimed,

“DARWINISM DEVELOPED, The Development Theory Tested.” The story that appeared under the headline did not report on some new scientific experiment but rather the history of the Parks family of Wyoming County, Pennsylvania. The narrative of the family would, the author promised, “awaken sensations of horror in the orthodox reader, but the believer in the theory of Darwin may find in them gratulation and encouragement.”35 The Herald story was not the first to find proof of Darwin's theory in the Parks family. In 1871, one of the earliest of the several stories and a short book about the family suggested that one of the Parks children “might furnish Darwin, or some of the advocates of the 'development hypothesis' with an instance of 'reversion' and he might find in this creature one of the missing links so long sought after.”36 To understand why

Americans explained Thomas Wells Parks and his two naked, mute and developmentally disabled children in this way, we need to look at their particular history, and the popular reception and understanding of evolution in America.

Following the publication of Origin, showmen quickly capitalized on the public interest in evolution by displaying physically different peoples. When Barnum exhibited

William Henry Johnson as “What is It?,” he described Johnson as a missing link captured

34 Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 3-5.

35 “Darwinism developed,” Sedalia (MO) Daily Democrat, February 20, 1876, 1.

36 “Wild Children,” Scranton Republican, republished in Cleveland Morning Herald, November 27, 1871, 1.

209 in Africa. The Wild Men of Borneo, the Wild Australian Children and the Aztec children were likewise developmentally disabled persons who, labeled as members of “lost races” or “missing links,” became part of circuses or sideshows. During the 1870s and 1880s, entertainers staged numerous such exhibitions in which people who appeared to the

American public as physically or culturally different were presented as proof of evolution.37 Such displays are understandable given the context of many Americans’ belief in the inferiority of physically different people.

But if it is clear why an act like “What Is It?” could play upon popular understandings of Darwinism, it is far more opaque why Americans thought Darwin's theory explained a family like the Parks. Nor were the Parks the only non-savage Wild

Men linked to Darwin's theory. Newspapers described the bandit known as the Wild Man of Yolo as “a human being who ought to interest Darwin and his followers.”38 The New

York Times suggested that a Wild Man from Tennessee might be “that lost link for which

MR. DARWIN is looking.”39 All these Wild Men were not relics of a bygone age, but individuals who had become Wild. The understanding of evolution that these stories reflected was expressed clearly in an 1886 New York Times article which, while discussing Wild Men and human monsters, argued that, “The evolutionists are also more than casually interested. Shall we say that human beings gradually and steadily became more perfect? Or shall we argue that some branches took a backward track, such as we

37 Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London: Routledge, 2002), 74-75.

38 “The Wild Man of Yolo,” Janesville (Wis.) Gazette, November 17, 1879, 1.

39 “What Is It?,” New York Times, April 26, 1871, 4.

210 see that individual ‘wild man’ take.”40 Both the notions expressed in that statement, that human beings are becoming more perfect and that some humans take an evolutionary

“backward track,” are completely contrary to the theory of evolution expressed by the current scientific community. But from the 1870s to the 1890s, these ideas were both present in mainstream scientific and popular thinking about evolution and essential to understanding why the Wild Parks were “Darwinism Developed.”

The Parks family patriarch Thomas Wells Parks was, taken by himself, no more than an eccentric. After marrying, he moved from the neighboring county to Monroe

Township in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles northwest of the coal emporium of Scranton. Though timber, charcoal, and tanning were the major local industries until the early 1870s, when anthracite coal mining became increasingly important, many of the slopes and valleys of the mountainous county were still heavily forested. In that forest, Parks built a small cabin and planted potatoes in a clearing. The elder Parks was very learned for a man living such a basic existence. He was a student of the bible and ancient history and had developed a new system of shorthand. Many of the residents of the region claimed that the elder Parks knew Greek, Latin, Syriac, and could complete problems in trigonometry and Euclidean geometry. He was reputed to have had a great interest in astrology and some residents of the area thought he was a magician.

Others in the community had a much more negative opinion of the man, however. The local paper, the Wyoming Democrat, called him “Old Parks,” “too shiftless to take care of

40 “Some Human Monsters,” New York Times, March 21, 1886. 211 himself.” But what garnered the family national attention was not the strange but

knowledgeable elder Parks but his children.41

The Parks children, Bill and Malvina, first came to widespread regional attention

in 1871. The newspapers and the book that chronicled the family history are often in

conflict with each other, but the outline of their story is clear. In some accounts, the

family was already notorious when a group of hunters from either Tunkhannock or

Pittston set out in search of the family and, after seeing the family’s degraded condition,

reported their findings to the community. In other accounts, the children were first found

in the woods almost thirteen miles southeast of Monroe outside of Pittston. Finally,

several accounts mention that the children were exhibited by showman, either in

Honesdale, the seat of neighboring Wayne County, or by a neighbor named Robinson in

Scranton. The children's father may have been involved in these shows, during which he

lectured to display his “talents in contrast to their utter brutishness.” However, the shows

were a failure due either to a lack of interest or because they so outraged the community

that it threatened violence unless the children were returned. In any case, the children and

their father returned to their mountain home, where they received a load of supplies from

the people of Pittston. However, these offerings do not seem to have sufficed and the

elder Parks made arrangements with a second show man, Frank Phelphs of Elmira, New

41 The Wild Parks Family of Wyoming County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pa: Old Franklin Pub. House, 1874), 4-6. “Brute Man,” New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat, January, 39, 1874, 1. “Darwinism developed,” Daily Democrat. “Living as savages,” Aiken (SC) Courier Journal, March 25, 1876, 11. “The Wild Mutes of Monroe,” Milwaukee Sentinel, June 24, 184. Wyoming (PA) Democrat, January 21, 1874.

212 York, to take charge of the children and exhibit them. This second attempt was no more successful than the first, and the family returned to the cabin.42

What drew regional attention to the children and made them fit for public exhibition was their degraded state. The most notable characteristic of the children was their nudity. Even in winter, the children ran naked or with a piece of cloth draped across their shoulders. When the people of Pittston brought the family supplies, “Clothing had to be put on the children by force and as soon as they were released, they tore it to shred.”43

During the period when the children were exhibited it was only “by a severe course of beating and cruel treatment [that] the mutes were forced to submit to being clothed.” The children were mute or only spoke by “chattering a strange gibberish.”44 While they sometimes ate with their father, often they foraged for their food, gathering nuts, roots and catching small rodents or reptiles which they ate raw. While the papers often described them as not ill-formed, they also stated that, because of their Wild lifestyle, the children developed a hunched or stooped posture and thick calluses on their bodies from walking on all fours or squatting on the ground.45 The most vivid expressions of the Wild

Parks, particularly William’s bestial nature, and the description of them that most closely conforms to the Wild Man figure comes from an 1874 book put out by a true crime

42 “A Wild family in Pennsylvania,” Pittston Comet, republished in Evening Gazette (Fort Jervis, NY), November 14, 1871, 1. “Wild Children,” Scranton Republican. “The Wild Mutes of Monroe,” Milwaukee Sentinel. “Darwinism developed,” Sedalia Daily Democrat. “Brute Man,” New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat. The Wild Parks Family, 27.

43 “Darwinism developed,” Daily Democrat.

44 “Brute Man,” New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat.

45 “A Wild family in Pennsylvania,” Pittston Comet. “Wild Children,” Scranton Republican. “The Wild Mutes of Monroe,” Milwaukee Sentinel. “Darwinism developed,” Sedalia Daily Democrat. “Brute Man,” New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat. The Wild Parks Family, 27.

213 publisher, Old Franklin Publishing House. The book, like several of the articles about the family, purported to be the account of one of the hunters who had set out to find the family and conforms closely to the newspaper accounts of the family. The book repeatedly invokes the Wild Man figure to describe William, for example stating he was

“maniacal and bound with ropes like a second Orson.” The book is also the only account to endow him with the most extreme features of the Wild Man, stating that “his whole body, quite likely from constant exposure to the elements, is covered with close, short, bristly hair, giving him quite the appearance of Esau.” Esau was the biblical son of Isaac and brother of Jacob; his name meant “hairy” in Hebrew. But just as much as it invoked the Wild Man figure, it also drew comparisons between William and animals. William looked “like the Gorilla of Equatorial Africa,” and he and his sister “squatted like monkeys.” Indeed the book went so far as to say, “we never beheld in the shape of humanity a creature that so nearly approached the lower animals as this crouching, horrible, naked man-fiend.”46 However inhuman and animalistic the Wild Parks appeared, the true message of their inhumanity for those who recorded their life came from their behavior.

While they were young, the children were mute and wild but their parents were able to exercise some degree of control over them. At some point, perhaps in 1867 but most likely in late 1870 or 1871, when William was twenty and Malvina twenty-two,

William attacked his mother and she fled the homestead, leaving the children in their father’s care. The children become even more unruly after being taken by the showmen and likely brutalized by them. William began to repeatedly attack his sister and Thomas

46 The Wild Parks Family, 4-5.

214 was forced to tie up his children whenever he left the cabin. During this period Malvina gave birth to a child. Thomas Parks suggested the father was one of the showmen who exhibited her, but the newspapermen believed it was actually William. After the baby was born the elder Parks cared for it for a time. One day, however, William and Malvina were able to get hold of the baby and ripped it apart with their hands. Thereafter William attacked Malvina and stabbed her in the knee, which later caused a fatal infection. The elder Parks took no action after this violence until William attacked him as well, at which point he asked for help from the county authorities, who came and took William away.47

Both the court and local newspaper records from Wyoming County are so incomplete that it is difficult to know exactly what happened to William and Malvina.

Many of the regional papers that covered the family in depth likely did not fully survive.

The Tunkhannock Republican reported on January 14, 1874 that the “'wild man of

Monroe,' the idiotic son of a man named Parkes.... was brought over on charges of assault and battery, but this is supposed to be only a pretext few for saddling the expense of his care upon the county.”48 The report stated that he could not make his wants known and that jail was no place for him. The Wyoming Democrat on the same day also reported that the “Monroe Idiot...who had gained some notoriety as the ‘Wild Mute’ of Wyoming, has been placed in the county jail for his own personal comfort and to restrain him from taking the life of his 'respected parent.'” The following week the Democrat defended the county against charges of inhumanity for letting the Parks children run wild, stating that

47 “A Wild family in Pennsylvania,” Pittston Comet. “Wild Children,” Scranton Republican. “The Wild Mutes of Monroe,” Milwaukee Sentinel. “Darwinism developed,” Sedalia Daily Democrat. “Brute Man,” New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat. The Wild Parks Family, 27.

48 Tunkhannock Republican, January 14, 1874.

215 the county had acted upon the first appeal to intervene in the situation, that their father had resources but was lazy, and that “their free mode of life was, perhaps as happy a state as could be provided for them.” On January 28, the Democrat stated that the elder Parks had not made out a case of assault and battery.49 William’s ultimate fate is unclear, but it seems that he was institutionalized in the state asylum in Danville for a time.50 In 1879, however, William appeared in the press again, where conflicting reports stated that he was either out of the asylum and stealing grain from fields or long dead.51

As was the case with many other Wild People, those who discussed the Wild

Parks family did not agree on any one theory to explain their condition. The Wild Parks

Family attributed their condition to the fact that Thomas Parks and his wife were cousins, a detail which does not appear in any other accounts of the family. In the book, the elder

Parks himself explains the children's condition as largely environmental. According to

Parks, because the family lived in the wilderness and had no money for clothes, he and his wife let their children run without them. But when the family finally wanted to clothe the children, they refused because “habits will grow upon people.”52 Indeed, the notion that the manner and environment in which the children were raised resulted in their condition was widespread. One paper reported that the parents believed “they didn't need any clothes out here in the woods,” while another stated, “Parks and his wife believed

49 Wyoming Democrat, January 14, 1874. Wyoming Democrat, January 21, 1874. Wyoming Democrat, January 28, 1874.

50 Wild Parks Family, 29. “Darwinism develop,” Daily Democrat.

51 The Wellsboro (PA) Agitator, December 23, 1879. The Wellsboro Agitator, December 30, 1879. “The Pennsylvania Wild Man,” The National Police Gazette; Dec 27, 1879, 13.

52 Wild Parks Family, 13.

216 that it was useless to clothe their children out in the wilderness where they lived.”53 A few papers offered alternative explanations: the Tunkhannock Republican blamed

William’s muteness on scarlet fever, while the Wyoming Democrat stated, “they were simply born idiots.”54 In the Nation Police Gazette, the elder Parks stated that the children were born “demented,” but that their mother also forced them to drink spirits of turpentine.55 But the Scranton Republican, one of the papers which suggests the children were an example of the reversion hypothesis, argued that their condition was the result of

“ill use and neglect” and “since their introduction to civilized life they have improved in disposition and habits, and show that with proper care their redemption from their present barbarous condition is possible.”56 Thus the family’s condition, even when explained as the product of environmental or cultural conditions, was still tied to Darwinism.

Remarkably, the idea that a naked homicidal mute whose condition was caused either by environment or heredity was evidence of evolution was quite keeping with both the

American scientific community and the public’s understanding of the theory.

When in 1859 Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the idea that species of organisms could undergo change was already several decades old. These theories were not so much predecessors to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but rather alternative theories that would inform both scientists and lay people alike until the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the combination of evolution by

53 “Darwinism Developed,” Daily Democrat. “Brute Man,” Ohio Democrat.

54 The Tunkhannock Republican. Wyoming Democrat, January 21, 1874.

55 “Pennsylvania Wild Man,” National Police Gazette.

56 “Wild Children,” Scranton Republican.

217 natural section and Mendelian genetics, in the twentieth century. The Comte de Buffon was among the first to propose that closely related species differ from each other as a result of changes over time. The first true proponents of the transformation of species, however, were Erasmus Darwin, grandfather to Charles, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, both of whom proposed their theories around the turn of the eighteenth century. Erasmus

Darwin argued that organisms strove to improve themselves and that characteristics they acquired during life were transmitted to their decedents. Lamarck’s theory was much the same but more fully developed. Lamarck argued that the spontaneous generation of simple organisms was continually taking place. Over time these organisms became more complex as they adapted themselves to their environments. Like Erasmus Darwin,

Lamarck argued that species transmitted inherited characteristics to their decedents. As animals adapted to their environments, they reshaped their bodies and passed those changes on to their descendants. Thus, rather than species being distinct, Lamarck understood there to be merely gradients of organisms, each adapted more perfectly to its environment.

The idea of transformation continued to percolate through the scientific community in the early decades of the century, but its big break into wider European culture came in 1844, when publisher Robert Chambers anonymously printed his

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. In Vestiges, Chambers argued that life had progressed from the simple to the complex over time. While he did not propose that species changed in response to their environments, the popularity of Chambers’ work helped spread the notion that species change over time. The works of these three thinkers helped prepare the public for the general idea of evolution that appeared in Charles

218 Darwin's publications. But they also created a culture that did not readily accept Darwin's

most notable contribution, the idea of evolution by natural selection.57

As Peter J. Bowler has argued, these alternative theories of evolution were far

more suited to the intellectual culture of the second half of the nineteenth century than

Darwin's theory of natural selection. Natural selection privileged randomness over

progressiveness. In contrast to other theories of evolution, it lacked both a hierarchal

order and teleology. In Darwin's theory there was no great chain of being leading to

human beings, merely species adapted to their environment. Thus, while evolution was

widely accepted in Europe and North America, and while Darwin's work was responsible

for much of the great interest in the subject, most people either rejected or did not

understand the theory of natural selection. Even many of the thinkers most closely

associated with Darwin, such as Alfred Russell Wallace or Herbert Spencer, differed

greatly from Darwin when it came to natural selection. Wallace, for example, understood

natural selection to be the result of competition between the environment and the

individual, not among individuals within an environment. Spencer, who was much more

interested in the social aspects of evolution than Darwin, and as such was a greater

proponent of Social Darwinism than Darwin himself, was more deeply influenced by

Lamarck’s notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics than he was by natural

selection. Even the term evolution itself was coined in reference to what was also called

the recapitulation theory, which developed out of embryonic research. Recapitulation

theory, which argued that an embryo passes through all the evolutionary stages of the

species during its development, was decidely Lamarckian, hierachical and telographical.

57 Peter J. Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 53, 55-66 and 72-73. 219 Indeed much of the research and discussion devoted to Darwinism prior to the twentieth century was focused on arguing that it was incorrect and that other mechicanims of species changes, mechanisms that were more hierachical and progessive, could best explain the transmutation of species.58

This embrace of evolution or the transformation of species over time, accompanied by the rejection of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, was particulary pronounced in the United States. Among American scientists, Lamarckianism, or Neo-Larmarckism as it was known by it proponents, was favored by the students of

Harvard professor and noted opponent of evolution Louis Agassiz. Lamackianism, with its emphasis on hierachy and teleology, was less out-of-line with the idealist philosophy of nature to which Agassiz subscribed than Darwinian evolution by natural section. Yet in considering the appeal of the Lamarckian mechanism of evolution, it would seem foolish to ignore its connections to the wider American concern with environmentalism.

Indeed, at its core, Lamarckianism was the belief that the body of an organism was permeable to the environment, that the body adapted itself to the environment, and that these changes were inheritable. In any case, Lamarckianism was the most dominant school of evolutionary thought in American science by the late 1870s.59

Not surprisingly, environmentalism and Lamarckianism were equally or even more promient in the social sciences, for they appealed to the reformist inclinations of those disciplines by suggesting that human beings could improve their lot by adapting to

58 Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 37, 47, 50-51, and 158, and 181. Peter J. Bowler, “Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism,” Journal of the History of Biology Vol. 38 No. 1 (Spring, 2005): 19-32 .

59 Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 155-159, 181. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, 59-60, 119- 121. Edward J. Pfeifer, “The Genesis of American Neo-Lamarckism,” Isis Vol. 56 No. 2 (Summer, 1965): 156-167.

220 or changing their environment. What is more, Lamarckianism suggests that not only

could bodily changes be acquired and then passed on by an organism, so could behavior.

Even after its discrediting by the research of Friedrich Leopold August Weismann, Neo-

Lamarckian ideas still continued to resonate with many scientists. Neo-Lamarckian

environmentalism continued to have an impact following the rediscovery of Mendelian

genetics as the relationship between environmental impacts, cultural inheritance and

heredity remained unclear.60 Given the long history of environmentalist explanations for

human nature in American culture and the difficulties biological and medical researchers

even today have in drawing distinctions between environmental, cultural and heritable

impacts, it is not surprising that Neo-Lamarckian evolutionists and the environmentalist

social scientists they influenced were unable to draw clear distinctions between these

categories.

This same type of confusion can be found in the concept of degeneration, which,

while an important component of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century

evolutionary thought, was never a single systematic or coherent idea. Its appeal may have

rested in its resonance with pre-Darwinian monogenesis explanations of human

difference as stemming from something akin to the biblical fall in which human beings

degenerated from the perfect forms in which they were created. For some thinkers,

degeneration could be the product of a particular environment in which a degenerate form

was the fittest. It was a common maxim that in a depraved or brutish environment, only

60 Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, 16, 66, 99, and 106. Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13, 20-22. A. Campbell and D. N. Livingstone, “Neo-Lamarckism and the Development of Geography in the United States and Great Britain,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series Vol. 8 No. 3 (1983), 267-294. Stephen Frenkel, “GEOGRAPHY, EMPIRE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM,” Geographical Review Vol. 82 No. 2 (1992): 143-153.

221 the depraved or brutish would be fit.61 Leading American naturalist and Neo-Larmakian

Alpheus Hyatt incorporated degeneration, which he called retardation, into his theories of

generic age, which held that species gain and lose vigor over time.62 However, most

thinkers who incorporated degeneration into evolutionary thought were not evolutionary

theorists like Hyatt. Many physicans, particulary those from the American south, believed

that diseases and other negative traits such as mental illness were heritable and accounted

for differences between human beings, including racial difference.63

Another prominent strain of degeneracy theory grew out of the work of influential

Italian criminal anthropoloist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso took the recapitulation theory

and applied it to explain socially deviant behavior. Many criminals, Lombroso argued,

suffered from atavism: in their development they never left the stage of the brutish

savage. In America, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, many social

reformers and progressives belived that changes in the environment could arrest the

degeneration of immigrants in urban slums.64 Though a relic of pre-Darwinian thought,

degeneration retained a place in an American cosmology that held that evolution was a

hierarchical process. If an organism or individual could evolve forward, then it would

made sense that it could degenerate backwards.

61 Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 29, 48.

62 Pfeifer, “The Genesis of American Neo-Lamarckism,” 156-167.

63 Stuart C. Gilman, “DEGENERACY AND RACE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE IMPACT OF CLINICAL MEDICINE,” Journal of Ethnic Studies Vol. 10 No. 4 (Winter, 1983): 27-44.

64 Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 120-125. Bannister, 167. Daniel E. Bender, “PERILS OF DEGENERATION: REFORM, THE SAVAGE IMMIGRANT, AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT,” Journal of Social History Vol. 42 Issue 1. (Fall 2008): 5-30. 222 The popular press' Darwinian interpretation of the Wild Parks family is explained

by a cultural understanding of evolution that included the possibility of degeneration and

atavism, that saw environmental impact as inheritable, and that saw the human body as

malleable to the environment. Indeed, the Parks family and the explanation of their nature

are quite reminiscent of Robert Douglas's 1877 study of the Jukes family. While Douglas

called his work The Jukes, a study in crime pauperism, disease, and hereditary, his

notion of heredity was strongly Neo-Lamarckian; the environment affected the outcome

of heredity, and hereditary produced an environment that perpetuated that hereditary.

Thus, Douglas did not draw a true distinction between the impact of what we might think

of as an individual's genetic heritage and their environmental heritage. What is more,

Douglas and other Lamarckian social reformers like Lester Ward believed that changes in

environment could result in changes in an individual’s heredity. According to Douglas,

“environment is the ultimate controlling factor in determining careers, placing heredity

itself as an organized result of invariable environment. The permanence of ancestral types

is only another demonstration of the fixity of the environment within limits which

necessitates the development of typical characteristics.”65 The Jukes were but one

example of the continued vibrancy of environmentalist explanations of human nature

even during the height of the so-called Darwinian revolution.

Darwin may have sparked international interest in evolutionary theory, but that

did not mean that Darwinism, evolution by natural selection of random heritable

characteristics, was either widely understood or accepted. Indeed, since most American

65 Bowler, Eclipse of Darwin, 36-39. Richard Louis Dugdale, "The Jukes": A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity: Also Further Studies of Criminals (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1877), 65- 66. 223 evolutionary theorists remained environmentalists in the form of Neo-Lamarckians, it is not surprising that the popular press had only a limited understanding of evolution.

Americans could understand any notion of the change of an organism, evolution, degeneration, reversion, development, and any concept of the mutability of the body as

Darwinism. It was not until the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work on genetics in the early twentieth century that environmentalism was replaced by heredity as the key factor in explaining human difference and variation. This is not to say that environmentalism vanished, but rather it adopted new forms, particularly the progressive belief in the importance of culture and a sanitary environment. But this new interpretation of human nature, one fixed by heredity but subject to the impact of culture or environment, resulted in a profound change in the American Wild Man.

224

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Devolution of the Wild Man.

During the decades surrounding the twentieth century, the figure of the Wild Man

underwent a profound change. While Americans had always meant many things by the

term Wild Man, increasingly they used it to indicate people who acted in an uncontrolled

manner without suggesting that such behavior was a product of the environment. While

in 1889 the New York Times would use the term Wild Man to refer to a being “gigantic in

stature, covered with a thick growth of hair, and carr[ying] in his hand a huge knotted

stick,” by 1911, a wild man merely referred to a crazed ironworker who smashed up the

Plaza Hotel.1 Such change was typical of newspapers across the country. Many factors

can help explain this change. By the beginning of the new century, Americans had largely

ceased to settle new lands in the continental United States. The mental aspect of the Wild

Man figure, his wildness, was pathologized by psychologists and physicians as mental

illness. The growth of the state asylum system meant there were fewer individuals

roaming the woods who might be seen as Wild Men. Perhaps most importantly, these

decades saw an increased belief on the part of Americans that human nature was a

product of heredity rather than environment. Americans became more interested in

explaining human diversity—in appearance, manner of life, and success in American

society—as a product of unchanging inherited differences between people.

1 “Wild Man of Tennessee,” New York Times, February 8, 1889. “Wild Man disturbs the Plaza Hotel,” New York Times, April 30, 1911, 6. 225 As a result of these changes, the Wild Man figure began to fracture. The most positive aspect of the figure, his powerful body, was appropriated by white Americans who, while fearing the corrosive effects of civilization, believed that wilderness could strengthen the white male body. The other aspect of the figure, his bestial nature, was largely forgotten in the United States or merged into Americans’ more general racial prejudices.

This was not the case in British Columbia, where during these same decades

Euro-Canadians came to see the Wild Man figure as both something that belonged to the native peoples of Canada and yet was also inhuman. By appropriating and combining

Wild Man-like figures from Native Canadian cultures with those of Euro-North

American cultures, white Canadians created the modern figure of Sasquatch/Bigfoot.

The Un-Degenerated Wild (White) Man

The decades surrounding the turn of the century saw an overall growth in the importance of heredity and ancestry in American culture. By the 1890s, many Americans reacted to immigration from southern and eastern Europe by embracing racialist thinking that questioned the whiteness of these new immigrants. This racialist world view posited that European ethnic groups, as well as peoples of Asian, African and Native American descent, comprised different races whose origins and differences stretched back into antiquity. Many white Americans, particularly in New England and the Midwest, embraced Anglo-Saxonism, the belief that the descendents of Anglo-Saxons possessed the best cultural and biological characteristics of any race. Such beliefs were comforting

226 to those Americans fearful of new immigrants and their own social displacement in the

American economic system.2

This racialist world view drew on the hierarchical teleology of conservative

American Neo-Lamarckians, who came to argue that changes in response to the environment took place over extremely long spans of time and thus racial groups would remain unchanged. This type of Neo-Lamarckism complemented a recapitulation theory in which an individual during embryonic development passed through each stage of the species’ evolutionary history. According to this theory, each acquired trait could be seen developing on top of previous traits. Some theorists like G. Stanley Hall saw this as a mechanism for the transmission of behavioral traits and believed that recapitulation continued through adolescence. Thus racial differences were the result of the ancestral experiences of different groups, and while such groups would change in response to new environmental factors, these changes would be so slow as to be meaningless in real terms.3 The re-discovery of Mendelian genetics and the culmination of several decades of research questioning Lamarckian evolution after the turn of century only hardened such racialist worldviews on the importance of ancestry. Leading eugenics researcher William

Davenport argued that the racial characteristics of different European emigrant groups did not change over time, and the idea that new European immigrants could racially and

2 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 77-78. Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895-1904 (Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1981), 12, 41.

3 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 92. Peter J. Bowlers, Eclipse of Darwin: Anti- Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 99-101. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 115-166.

227 culturally assimilate belonged to the “pre-Mendelian world.” Indeed, the racialist emphasis on national origins and the unchanging impact of ancestry were codified into

U.S. law with the Immigration Act of 1924.4

Historians of masculinity and fin de siecle America have argued that this racialist worldview was closely tied to middle class white men's attempts to redefine the meaning of manhood in the midst of profound structural changes in American society. While in earlier decades of the nineteenth century these men associated manhood with self- retaining manliness, by the 1880s concerns about over-civilization and the loss of white male autonomy, vitality and virility resulted in a fusion of a discourse of manhood with a discourse of civilization and white supremacy. Turn-of-the-century white men proclaimed their manhood by articulating the superiority of their masculine civilization over other races but also attempted to appropriate the powerful masculinity of non-white peoples. In the eyes of cosmopolitan white Americans, the ideal man was one who combined civilization with the masculine power of their more primitive ancestors. Many cosmopolitan Americans embraced what historian Roderick Nash has called the “cult of the primitive” in which Americans turned to the wilderness as both the creator of the

American national character and a reservoir of its virility. Men like Theodore Roosevelt embraced the so-called primitive life, camping, hunting, or going on safaris in Africa in order to demonstrate both the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization and its retention of savage violent masculinity. Naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton advocated that boys join organizations like the Wood Craft Indians or the Boy Scouts in order to avoid the degenerative impact of over-civilization. G. Stanley Hall developed educational theories

4 Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 22-24. Jacobson, 78. 228 based on the idea that young boys literally pass through stages of evolutionary and racial development and that it was essential for their development for them to behave savagely.5

Indeed, recapitulation theory, which was the foundation of Hall's education methods, offered a solution to the problem of over-civilization and the declining virility of the

American male by positing that within each man lay a primitive and powerful ancestral

Wild Man figure, the caveman.

The figure of the caveman as it appeared in both academic archeology and popular culture was a reworked Wild Man. Anthropologist Judith Berman points out that the image of the caveman is easily recognized by a number of consistent traits: he inhabits either a cave or a wild setting, he carries wooden or stone tools, he is draped in fur, and he has long unkempt hair, a beard, and significant body hair. Yet, Berman argues, the caveman image is not supported by any type of archaeological evidence.

Instead, the image of the hairy, powerful, club-wielding caveman is based on the visual iconography of the Wild Man. This iconographic mixing of the Wild Man and primitive or ancestral peoples such as ancient Britons or Celts has a long history in early European anthropology.6 By the late 1850s, the archaeological record, such as Neanderthal skulls, demonstrated the great antiquity of human beings and provided some scientific basis upon which artists could create images of human ancestors. Yet elements of Wild Man

5 Bederman, 42, 77-120 and 207. John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 30-32. Roderick Nash, “The American Cult of the Primitive,” American Quarterly Vol.18 No. 3 (Autumn, 1966): 517-537. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books), 199.

6 Judith C Berman, “Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic: Modern (Re)Constructions of the Cave Man,” American Anthropologist Vol.101 No. 2 (1999): 288. Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 48, 81-89.

229 iconography, such as the club and hairiness, remained part of the image of human ancestors even after these archaeological discoveries. Darwin's explanation of humanity’s evolutionary relationship with apes served only to increase the importance of the Wild

Man image in scientific work. As early as 1871, the year Charles Darwin published his

Descent of Man, newspapers like the New York Times were asking if the Wild Man was

“that lost link for which Mr. Darwin is looking.”7 Scientific illustrators came to depict human ancestors not as powerful hairy men clothed in furs who wielded clubs, as was common prior to Darwin, but as compounds of human and ape characteristics. While these images were heavily influenced by archaeological evidence and anthropological depictions of non-white people, the elements of the Wild Man like body hair, disheveled head hair, and the club were also central to the image. In America, the caveman as Wild

Man image was circulated in magazines like Harper’s and in the great natural history museums of the turn of the century, particularly those that housed Charles M. Knight's paintings: the Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in

New York.8

The late nineteenth-century creation of the caveman as Wild Man allowed cosmopolitan Europeans and Euro-Americans a new way to imagine themselves and their relationship with nature. The caveman was a Wild Man whose separation from white civilization was not the result of environmental degeneration but of time. The Wild

Man/caveman's negative characteristic, his inhumanity, was safely located in the past.

Yet according to recapitulation theory, as an ancestral figure, the Wild Man/caveman was

7 “What Is It?,” New York Times, April 26, 1871, 4.

8 Moser, 141. 230 also literarily in the blood of the modern cosmopolitan man, and he possibly had access to the benefits of the Wild Man's power without suffering degeneration. Prior to the twentieth century, the Wild Man figure was abhorrent in part because he violated middle class notions of the proper mode of living. While individuals might praise a Wild Man’s powerful body, they were also revolted by his basest characteristics, like eating raw food, living in caves, or terrifying the community. The Wild Man was inherently unmanly because he lacked self-control. By the turn of the century, however, middle class men could see the Wild Man's characteristics, including his physical strength, his freedom from social convention, and even his unchecked passion, as the antidote to their own ills and worries. In the Wild Man/caveman, white men could see how these traits had allowed their ancestors to survive, flourish and dominate the natural world. Thus a new type of

Wild Man figure appeared in urban and cosmopolitan culture, the un-degenerate Wild

Man. This type of Wild Man was a white man whose hereditary superiority guarded him from the deleterious impact of his wild life. He was a statement to the superiority and invulnerability of the white male body to the challenges of both nature and civilization.9

The most prominent of these early twentieth-century un-degenerated Wild Man figures was the much-studied character Tarzan from Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.

Tarzan was a Wild Man in that he was a child who grew up separated from humanity in the wilderness and as a result possessed great physical prowess and lacked all human culture. He was the son of Lord Greystroke, a British noble of long and distinguished lineage who was left stranded with his wife, Lady Alice, on the shores of Africa by a mutinous crew. While the Greystokes managed to build a hut and survive for a time, they

9 Kasson, 8.

231 eventually died, leaving behind their son, who was adopted by the kind ape Kala. Raised in the jungle among the apes, the young Tarzan gained the physical prowess of a Wild

Man: “Though but ten years old he was fully as strong as the average man of thirty, and far more agile than the most practiced athlete ever becomes. And day by day his strength was increasing.” Yet Burroughs reshaped his Wild Man in light of turn-of-the-century middle class American discourse on manhood, race and civilization. Tarzan was in no way degenerate or even harmed by his wilderness experience. He was not covered in hair, and the cultural aspect of the Wild Man's character, such as lack of speech or eating raw meat, vanished once he encountered the rudiments of civilization. What made Tarzan different from degenerate types of Wild Men was Burroughs' emphasis on his race.

Tarzan was an “ape-man with the heart and head and body of an English gentleman, and the training of a wild beast.”10 For Burroughs, Tarzan's heredity allowed him to exist at a level of civilization above the apes that raised him or the African tribesmen he fought and to eventually become part of European civilization.11

Gail Bederman identifies Tarzan as the perfect embodiment of turn-of-the-century ideas about manhood because he combined “the ultimate Anglo-Saxon manliness with the most primal masculinity.”12 As a young boy, Tarzan is able to kill a great gorilla because “In his veins… flowed the blood of the best of a race of mighty fighters, and back of this was the training of his short lifetime among the fierce brutes of the jungle.”13

10 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (New York: A.L. Burt Co, 1914), 57, 119.

11 Kasson, 212.

12 Bederman, 221.

13 Burroughs, 72.

232 In the character of Tarzan, Burroughs proclaims that the hereditary makeup that allowed the white caveman to defeated savage beasts and allowed white men to create empires out of wilderness and conquer non-white people still existed within the modern white man.14

All he needed was an environment in which these characteristics could develop. Unlike the Wild Man who lost his humanness in response to his invigorating wilderness habitat,

Burroughs depicts the white male as essentially invulnerable to the negative aspects of nature. As Kasson says of Tarzan, “He could be strengthened rather than degraded by the wild precisely because he holds the best of western civilization within him.”15

In the year following the first publication of Tarzan of the Apes, New England artist and sometimes hunting guide Joseph Knowles sought to demonstrate that any man could be like Tarzan. While Tarzan's power stemmed from his heredity and wilderness upbringing, Knowles attempted to demonstrate that the latter was unnecessary. A white man, even one like Knowles who had lived in civilization, could conquer nature and be strengthened by the process. The white man's heredity need only be exposed to the proper environment and it could flourish.

In August of 1913, Knowles, in collaboration with the Boston Post, stepped naked into the Maine woods. Knowles was to live for two months on nature's bounty, making his own tools and clothing and providing the Post with regular dispatches on his exploits written on birch bark in charcoal. In article after article the Post shared Knowles’ adventures with the public. Each Sunday the readership learned of the “Natural Man's” latest triumph or hardship. One week he trapped a small bear in a pitfall and clubbed it to

14 Kasson, 197, 205-207.

15 Kasson, 212.

233 death. Another week he caught a deer with his bare hands. When he finally returned to civilization, clad in his bearskin and deerskin leggings, he received a hero's welcome throughout New England. Though rival newspapers and later publications claimed that

Knowles was a fraud, for the fall of 1913 he was one of the most popular men in the nation because he served as living testament that modern white men had neither suffered permanent damage from civilization nor were dependent upon it for survival. Knowles democratized the conquest of wilderness. As he wrote in the introduction to his book chronicling his experience, Alone in the Wilderness, “Any man of fair health could do the same thing, provided he meant business and kept his head.”16

The image of Knowles that he and his accomplices at the Boston Post created drew on the iconography of the Wild Man figure. Having entered the woods clean-shaven and plump, Knowles returned “having lived the life of a primitive man for two months in the wilderness of northern Maine. I was tanned to the color of an Indian. I had a matted beard, and long, matted hair. I was scratched from head to foot by briers and underbrush.

Over the upper part of my body I wore the skin of a black bear, which I had fastened together in front with deerskin thong.”17 His beard, dark coloration and fur skins all were the visual symbols of the Wild Man figure. According to Knowles, when he first discussed taking up his life in the woods, “from time to time my friend would jokingly inquire when I was going to leave them and become a wild man.”18 Others referred to

16 Jim Motavalli, Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007), 65-68 and 76-80. Joseph Knowles, Alone in the Wilderness (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1913), 2. Roderick Nash, “The American Cult of the Primitive.”

17 Knowles, 1.

18 Ibid., 5.

234 him living the life of the caveman.19 Knowles and his publishers, however, preferred the term “Natural Man,” which lacked any of the negative connotations of the other terms.

Knowles, his publishers and those who examined his body articulated the idea that his two-month stay in the wilderness had profoundly reshaped his body. A short time into his wild life, Knowles found himself “far stronger” than he was when he first

“entered the forest.”20 Moreover, as a result of going about naked during the day,

Knowles claimed, “my skin was so tanned and inured to the weather that I did not feel the cold.”21 Even stronger statements of the physical benefits of his wild life came from the

Harvard physician who examined him upon his return. The doctor claimed that in two months Knowles had become superhuman in his bodily development. Using a test he developed to measure physical fitness, the doctor claimed that while a Harvard crew team member would score seven hundred points, Knowles scored a nine hundred and seventy four, or a hundred and fifty points above “the hardest test taken by football men.”22 He also testified that, “Subjected to the action and the stimulus of the elements, Mr.

Knowles' skin has become a perfect skin. It serves him as an overcoat, because it is so healthful that its pores close and shield him from drafts and sudden chills.”23 The physician even went so far as to provide a table of bodily measurements comparing

Knowles to strongman Eugene Sandow and proclaiming, “he probably has the staying

19 Motavalli, 11, 49.

20 Knowles, 52.

21 Ibid., 143.

22 Ibid., 232.

23 Ibid.

235 power of three Sandows.”24 Like Mason Evans and other Wild Men before him, Knowles' experience in the Wild had reshaped his body. But unlike Evans, he never lost his humanity.

Tarzan and Knowles may have been fictions that drew upon the Wild Man image, but their ultimate meaning was very different from their predecessor. The Wild

Man image was predicated on the notion that the human body was permeable to the natural world and that there was nothing fundamental to human nature that could escape its grasp. Tarzan and Knowles, as “Natural Men,” were based on the idea that the white man's nature was fixed in his blood and to a degree impervious to fundamental change.

Tarzan might be raised by apes in the African wilderness, but he quickly demonstrated his racial superiority over both nature and non-white people. While Knowles might have grown flabby while living as an artist, exposed to the challenge of nature he retained the potential to flourish without fear of reversion. By the twentieth century, many cosmopolitan Americans saw the white male body as impervious, his civilized nature unassailable and the power of his wild ancestors available to be unleashed upon merely living the wilderness life.25

This is not to say that the traditional Wild Man figure was completely absorbed into the cosmopolitan cult of the Wilderness. Well into the twentieth century, Wild Man stories continued to appear in American newspapers. Some described the creature in inhuman terms, as was the case in Wild Man stories emanating from the southern coastal

Oregon counties of Curry and Coos in 1904. In March of that year the Myrtle Point

24 Ibid., 233.

25 Roderick Nash, “The American Cult of the Primitive.”

236 Enterprise reported that the prospectors had once again seen the “'Wild Man' of the

Sixes,” a creature “something after the fashion of a gorilla and unlike anything else either in appearance or actions” who was “about seven feet high... and covered by a prolific growth of hair.”26 Other stories still articulated the belief that human beings could be driven Wild from exposure to Wilderness. In 1906 the Los Angles Times received a special dispatch from Colorado Springs telling of a “Wild Man, nearly naked with brown hair several inches long covering his body.” The story claimed that the Wild Man was a

“man who was lost in a storm ten years ago and believed to be, still inhabiting the wilds to this day.”27 In 1912, a Wild Man who, “because of his wild life, had lost the gift of speech,” “possessed the strength of a giant” and “brandished a club,” appeared in a cave in southeastern New York.28 In 1901, a Wild Woman was captured with a lasso in a swamp outside of Charleston and brought to town and locked in a cage.29 In 1909, a Wild

Man appeared in an old mine near El Paso and “When seen recently by hunters, his hair and beard were white and long, and his body entirely, covered with white hair.”30 As late as 1938, authorities hunted down a wild family in Alabama who were described as

“animal like,” having “more hair than ordinary humans” and walking like gorillas.31

Stories of Wild People, covered in hair, endowed with great strength and bereft of

26 Myrtle Point (OR) Enterprise, March 11, 1904, 1.

27 Los Angles Times, January 20, 1906, 11.

28 “Crazed Caveman Barked,” New York Times, September 26, 1912, 1.

29 "Wild Woman is Captured,” Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1901, 2.

30 “Wild Man Appears,” Adams County Free Press, June 30, 1909, 8.

31 “Unclothed 'Wild' Man and Family Sought in Alabama Swamp,” Atlanta Constitution, April 15, 1938, 1. 237 speech, continued to circulate in American newspapers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

But Wild Man stories like those became increasingly rare. Americans most often used the term to describe individuals who lived in the woods, acted in a strange manner, or had long and disheveled hair. But there were few implications that these Wild Men were somehow inhuman or even reshaped at all by their experiences in the wilderness.

Americans might fear them for their criminal nature or pity them for their poverty or insanity, but they were not evidence of humanity's vulnerability to wild nature. Modern biology and medicine had no room for the notion that white men could become somehow inhuman due to their environment. White men might become powerful and manly from living in the wilderness, but they could not cease to be white men. The Wild Man figure no longer made sense in U.S. culture. But in British Columbia, the story was very different. There, the triumph of heredity and racialism did not undermine the Wild Man, because in British Columbia the Wild Man was not white.

From Wild Man to Sasquatch

While the turn of the century saw the Wild Man image adapted for the purposes of proclaiming the immutability of the white body in the cosmopolitan United States, in

British Columbia racial ideology reshaped the Wild Man into an image which today far exceeds even Tarzan in cultural prominence. White Canadians did not regard the Wild

Men of British Columbia as degenerated white men, but rather as creatures that both belonged to the Native Americans of that region in some way and yet were also utterly inhuman. In British Columbia, the Wild Man became the Sasquatch.

238 The association of Wild Men with native people and development of the

Sasquatch image has its origins in the particular history of native and settler violence and eventual white dominion in British Columbia. The arrival of settlers in British Columbia in the 1850s transformed the relatively cooperative relationship between white traders and Indians that had developed around the fur trade. White settlers had a much more negative view of British Columbian Indians because, unlike fur traders, they had little productive interaction with them. After 1858 white and native relations in the Frazier

Valley degenerated into violence, which by the 1870 and 1880s resulted in native peoples suffering from significant land alienation and population decline. Settlers were preoccupied with maintaining racial purity and distinction from Native People, seeing them as a different type of humanity. While prostitution, concubinage or other forms of sexual exploitation were common, marriage to whites or other types of legal protection for Indian woman was rare. While whites and native peoples lived in close proximity, the relationship was once of social and culture distance and hostility.32

By the end of the 1880s, the settler community had established a “pattern of dominance” in the region, typified by large-scale land alienation and attempts to destroy native culture by banning the potlatch ceremony. Government officials hastily laid out native reserves in the 1880s and 1890s but lacked the power to impact the large areas of land already alienated into white hands. Unlike reservations elsewhere in Canada or the

United States, reservations in British Columbia were numerous and small, as they were often based around traditional fishing spots. This design facilitated the white use of

32 Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1977), 88-93, 207.

239 Indian labor and increased cultural assimilation. The reserve system empowered government officials known as Indian Agents to exercise great control over individual

Indian lives and created restrictions on Indian movement. The ultimate end of the Indian

Agents and reserve system was to discipline native peoples and force their assimilation into the white community.33

Racialist thought in turn-of-the-century British Columbia was similar to that found elsewhere in Canada and in the United States. For example, in collecting information about its population, the British Columbian state borrowed much of its

“racial grammar” from the United States. Dividing its population into white, black, Asian and native, the British Columbian state characterized native peoples as assembled and

Asians as unassembled.34 Racialist thinking also influenced the outcome of legal cases relating to native title. In the case of St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Company v. 'The

Queen,' which controlled native title in Canada until 1973, Social Darwinism influenced the court’s holding that native title only existed at the crown’s pleasure.35

While the Canadian scientific and religious community was originally very hostile to Darwinism, there was a very strong strain of environmentalist thought in Canadian

33 R. Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 177, 270. Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990). Lynn A. Blake, “Pastoral Power, Governmentality and Cultures of Order in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series Vol. 24 No. 1 (1999): 79-93. John S. Lutz, Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 19. Fisher, 75.

34 Kay J. Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 77 No. 4 (December, 1987): 580-595. Renisa Mawani, “Cross-Racial Encounters and Juridical Truths: (Dis)Aggregating Race in British Columbia's Contact Zone,” BC Studies No. 156/157 (Winter/Spring 2007/08): 141-171.

35 Kent McNeil, “Social Darwinism and Judicial Conceptions of Indian Title in Canada in the 1880s,” Journal of the West Vol. 38 (January 1999): 68-76. 240 culture. By the 1880s, many Canadian scholars developed an evolutionary interpretation of Canadian history and culture that combined imperial ideologies with Neo-

Lamarckianism and Social Darwinism. These interpretations emphasized the harsh

Canadian environment, positing that the struggle against that environment would result in a particularly fit Canadian race. By the turn of the century, evolutionist and Social

Darwinian thinking was well established in Canadian culture. Many Canadian scientists and physicians, including many of those of a reformist inclination, were drawn to eugenic notions of breeding. Eugenics was particularly prominent in the western provinces of

Alberta and British Columbia. While Asian immigration was already restricted by the

1920s, the high-water mark for eugenics and racialism in Canada came in the early 1930s with passage of stricter immigration laws and British Columbia following Alberta in authorizing eugenic sterilization.36

It is within this context of white/Indian conflict resulting in the subjugation and confinement, but not the removal, of native peoples and the general rise of racialist and social Darwinian thought in British Columbia that stories came to first classify Wild Men as both inhuman and native. One of the earliest and most striking stories was from 1884, when a railroad employee outside of the upper Frazer Valley town of Yale captured “a creature which may truly be called half man and half beast.” Yale was once at the center of both the Frazier Valley gold rush and settler/native violence during the late 1850s and

36 Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 23-26, 46-47, and 90-91. Eric Gormley, "Popular Darwinism in Geography Textbooks in Canada, 1850-1920," Past Imperfect Vol. 2 (1993): 87-106. Suzanne Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin in Canada, 1859-1909,” in Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, ed. Ronald L., and John Stenhouse (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 91-121.

241 1860s. While whites had largely stopped mining in the area by the 1880s, it remained a location of seasonal gold washing by native peoples, who were able to draw tens of thousand of dollars worth of gold from the river each year. The newspaper story described the creature as “something of the gorilla type” that “resembles a human being with one exception, his entire body, excepting his hand (or paws) and feet are covered with glossy hair about one inch long.” The men who captured the creature, which stood under five feet tall and under a hundred pounds, referred to him as “Jacko,” which was a common name for apes, particularly chimpanzees held in captivity. Yet despite his inhuman appearance and name, neither the newspapermen nor the creature’s captors were positive what he was. The article ended by asking, “Does he belong to a species hitherto unknown in this part of the continent, or is he really what the train men first thought that he was, a crazy Indian?” While the story may have been a deliberate hoax, and was called such by a rival newspaper, it was an important indication of the transformation of the

Wild Man image that was taking place in British Columbia.37 In British Columbia, Wild

Men were either inhuman or Indian. This pattern of associating Wild Men with animals and native peoples would continue for the next fifty years.

During the first decade of the new century, white residents of British Columbia saw a profusion of Wild Men on and around Vancouver Island. In 1904, four hunters encountered a “modern Mowgli” by Horn Lake, which lies at the center of Vancouver

Island. According to the British Columbian Province, “the Wild Man was apparently young, with long matted hair and a beard, and covered with a profusion of hair all over

37 New Westminster Victoria British Columbia Mainland Guardian, July 9, 1884. John Greene and Sabina W. Sanderson, “Alas poor, Jacko,” Pursuit vol. 29 (1975): 18-19. “What is it?” Daily Colonist, July 4, 1884. “The Wild Man,” New Westminster Columbian, July 11, 1884.

242 the body.”38 In June of 1905, a local wrote to a “Government Agent Bray” for permission to shoot the Wild Man. Bray informed the man “it is unlawful to shoot Mowglies within the Province of British Columbia at any time.” American papers reported that over eleven people had seen a Mowgli in the region, and one rancher reported seeing several engaged in a “sun dance.”39 The use of the term Mowgli, a reference to the feral child of Richard

Kipling’s Jungle Book, to refer to a Wild Man only took place in British Columbia.

Kipling’s Mowgli was a South Asian Indian child raised by a wolf. By using the term

Mowgli, the Euro-Canadians were indicating that the Wild Man was human but that he was a non-white native. Like the natives of British Columbia, the Wild Man as Mowgli was the object of both white violence and protection. It was the decision of a government agent to allow or forbid the shooting of the Mowgli. In 1906, there was a hunt for the

“Mowgli” on Valdez Island near Vancouver Island.40 Another Wild Man story appeared in 1907 when the crew of the steamship Capilliano reported that Indians in Bishop Cove,

British Columbia were terrified by a “monkey-like wild man who howls in an unearthly fashion between intervals of exertion at clam digging.” The Indians described the creature as a “monkey covered with long hair and standing about five feet high.” While the story did not suggest the creature was an Indian, it called the beast something only seen by “superstitious natives.”41

38 British Columbian Province, December 14, 1904.

39 Van Wert Ohio Daily Bulletin, October 28, 1905.

40 Lincoln (NE) Evening News, January 1, 1906.

41 British Columbian Province, March 8, 1907.

243 This profusion of Wild Man stories in British Columbia took place in the context of some of the most dramatic efforts by the Provincial government to limit native access to natural resources following the creation of the reserve system. Since the 1880s, the government required native men to purchase a license in order to engage in hand-logging

(with only hand tools) of timber on unalienated crown lands. By the start of the twentieth century, many native men had purchased licenses and hand-longing was an important source of cash for coastal Indians. Between 1904 and 1907 over eleven million acres of the best timberland in the province was alienated into private hands, depriving Indian men of the ability to hand-log it, let alone turn it into a native reserve or return it to native title. In 1907, the provincial government stopped issuing hand-logging licenses entirely, effectively barring Indians from working as independent loggers and thus solidifying

Euro-Canadian dominance over timber resources.42

The alienation of timberland and the dehumanization of Native Americans through Wild Man stories came together in 1906 and 1907 in the person of Mike King.

King was “one of the best known timber cruisers in British Columbia,” a person responsible for assessing the amount of lumber a given track of trees could produce. In

1906, King “sold 200,000 acres of timberland in body B.C.,” one of the largest timber deals to have happened in the region.43 King also happened to be the “only man who ever had a close-range view of the half-human,” the Wild Man whom Vancouver Island residents had seen throughout the decade. In 1906 King attempted to organize an expedition to capture the creature, but he was distracted from the endeavor by interests in

42 Lutz, 245.

43 Daily Colonist, January 18, 1906, 6.

244 a mining enterprise in Mexico. While planning his expedition, however, King discussed at length his view of the creature with a Vancouver newspaper. King described the creature as a typical Wild Man, saying it was “an animal in the shape of a man, standing over six feet high, and covered all over with long, coarse black hair, which on some portions of the body was a foot long.” But King explicitly rejected the theory that the creature was a white man transformed into a Wild Man. In the front page article he stated,

“For even if a man lived in a wild state from birth he could not have assumed the apelike attributes possessed by this creature which I saw.” Instead, King argued that twenty-eight years prior, a ship carrying a gorilla had wrecked in the northern portion of the island.

According to the article, “natives tell gruesome tales of the animal having carried off a young squaw, who was not seen afterwards. The Indians assert that this wild man is the descendant of the escaped gorilla.” “This theory,” said King, “seems to me to be the only way to account for the origin of the strange being.”44 Rejecting the idea that the lost and presumably white body could degenerate from exposure to a wild environment, King instead turned to the very old belief that apes raped or interbred with non-white women.

The idea was a staple of early Americans’, including Thomas Jefferson, discussions of race, human origins, and the justification of slavery.45 Like the revolutionary-area slavery apologists, King was arguing that the gap between white and native peoples in Canada was far larger than between native people and the gorilla. And like apologists for slavery, he did so while benefiting from the implications, in this case the alienation of land to timber himself, and also arguing for racial inferiority.

44 “Plans Expedition to Catch Mowgli,” Vancouver Province, December 4, 1905, 1.

45 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond, Virginia: J.W. Randolph Press, 1853), 149.

245 Empire and the Wild (Indigenous) Man.

While the years following King's planned expedition saw a lull in Wild Man stories emanating from British Columbia, that was not the case elsewhere in the British

Empire. Following the end of the First World War, interest in the peoples, culture and conquest of the Himalayan region resulted in the creation of the Abominable Snowman in the English-speaking world. Soon thereafter the Abominable Snowman image arrived in

North American popular culture where it pre-figured and paved the way for the displacement of the Wild Man by the Sasquatch image.

The cultures of the Himalayan region were home to various types of Wild Man figures. Such figures varied considerably; some were more animal than human while others were more mystical in nature.46 While some English speakers, primarily British officials in the region, were aware of the figure, it was not until the early 1920s that the wider English world took notice during the First Mount Everest Expedition of 1921. The expedition, organized by the National Geographic Society in order to survey the Everest region for future attempts at the summit, garnered substantial press coverage in the

English-speaking world with its combination of imperialism, scientific discovery, and adventure. In a 21,000-foot high mountain pass in Nepal, expedition leader Colonel

Howard-Bury saw a set of human footprints in the snow. He later sent a telegraphed report of the expedition to the press in which he discussed the footprint and stated that his porters believed the footprints were those of “Wild Men of the Snow.” When the

46 Myra L. Shackley, Still Living?: Yeti, Sasquatch, and the Neanderthal Enigma (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983). John Russell Napier, Bigfoot; The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (New York: Dutton, 1973). Ralph Izzard, The Abominable Snowman Adventure (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). Charles Robert Stonor, The Sherpa and the Snowman (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955). William C. Osman Hill, “Abominable Snowmen: The Present Position,” Oryx 6 (1961).

246 expedition arrived back in Darjeeling, India, Henry Newman, a reporter for the Calcutta

Statesmen, interviewed some of the porters, who gave him a more detailed account of the

Wild Man. The name the porters used was metch kangmi, kangmi meaning snowman, while Newman translated metch as “abominable.” As he later admitted, a better but far less evocative translation of the term would be filthy or tattered.47

Newman's story and Howard-Bury's telegraph resulted in a series of articles and letters in the London Times. The first Times story appeared in late October of 1921 and told of the Abominable Snowmen and emphasized the humanness of the beings, stating they were likely murderers who had been driven away from human society, indicative more of homo sacre than hairy hominids. This story provoked a series of letters from various self-styled British Himalayan experts that detailed other wild man stories and reports. Like the first story, they emphasized that the Abominable Snowman was a kind of uncivilized outcast and not an inhuman hominid. A few letters also suggest that the footprints were from some type of animal such as a bear or lemur. One letter, however, compared the Abominable Snowman to the Wild Man of Germany's Hartz Mountains.48

47 H. W Tilman, Mount Everest, 1938 (Cambridge [England.]: University Press, 1948). Charles Robert Stonor, The Sherpa and the Snowman (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955). Ivan Terence Sanderson, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life; the Story of Sub-Humans on Five Continents from the Early Ice Age Until Today (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1961). David J. Hufford, "Humanoids and Anomalous Lights: Taxonomic and Epistemological Problems," Fabula Vol. 18 No. 3/4 (1977): 234-41. C. K. Howard-Bury, Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance (London, 1921). Peter H. Hansen, “The Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s,” The American Historical Review Vol. 101 No. 3 (June, 1996): 712-747. Gordon T. Stewart, “Tenzing's Two Wrist-Watches: The Conquest of Everest and Late Imperial Culture in Britain 1921-1953,” Past & Present No. 149 (November, 1995): 170- 197. HENRY NEWMAN, “The "Abominable Snowmen" Times, Jul 29, 1937, 15.

48 Colonel Howard Bury, “The Attempt On Everest,” Times, October 21, 1921, 11. W.G. Lockett, “Abominable Snowmen," (Letters to the Editor) Times, November 11, 1921, 6. C.A. Oliver, "Abominable Snowmen" (Letters to the Editor) Times, November 16, 1921, 11. Douglas W. Freshfield, The "Abominable Snowmen" (Letters to the Editor) Times November 02, 1921, 6. "Abominable Snowmen." (Letters to the Editor) Times Thursday, November 03, 1921, 11. Charles E. Simmonds, Aubyn Trevor Battye, “Abominable Snowmen," Times November 05, 1921, 11. 247 By January, the story had made it to North America. Both the Los Angles Times and the Atlanta Constitution carried stories about the Abominable Snowman. The short articles informed readers that the Everest exhibition reported “finding tracks in the snow of wild men called by the Tibetans 'abominable snowmen'” and that this “resulted in considerable discussion in London by experienced explorers of that region.”49 While the stories that appeared in the American papers were based on those from the Times, they emphasized the beings’ muscular development and hairiness. In February of 1922, even small papers like the Denton (Maryland) Journal carried Snowman stories. In a first page story entitled “He Saw a Snow Man,” the Journal reported that an “English man collaborates [the] story told by explorers.”50 The Abominable Snowman had become firmly fixed in the culture of the English-speaking world.

In 1937, interest in the creature was sparked again after a British traveler in Tibet published an account of seeing mysterious footprints in a high mountain pass in the

Times. This story provoked an even greater series of letters to the Times. Various experts and layman debated the nature and origins of the footprints, some suggesting they might be the result of animals, other humans, or a true Abominable Snowman. Even Newman wrote to the Times to confess how his poor translation had resulted in the creation of the figure.51 Such eruptions and debates over the nature of the Abominable Snowman would continue to draw interest for decades to come.

49 Atlanta Constitution December 21, 1921, 14. THE SNOWMAN. Los Angeles Times January 3, 1922, II5.

50 “He Saw a Snow Man” Denton (Maryland) Journal, February 24, 1922, 1.

51 Ronald Kaulback, “20 Months In Tibet II-Along The Salween, Mysterious Footprints,” Times, July 13, 1937, 15. E. B. Beauman, “The "Abominable Snowmen," Times, July 17, 1937; 13. Guy Dollman, “The "Abominable Snowmen," Times, July 19, 1937; 15. Kaulback, “The "Abominable Snowmen," Times, July 248 Much as it would be in the case of the Sasquatch image that followed it, those who told Abominable Snowman stories framed the Wild Man image as something belonging to the world of native peoples. The creature was an object of native belief, and it may very well have been a native. Like all things belonging to native peoples, western experts subjected these Wild Man stories to examination, evaluation and ultimately validation. The process by which the Snowman became known, studied and discussed by

British experts is in many ways comparable to the process by which any group of native people and the region they inhabited became known to western experts ranging from anthologists to government agents. Even the stories of tired porters became the objects of experts’ scrutiny. This process of knowing native belief in turn created a new image, a hairy, dangerous and inhuman creature, covered in long white hair and known as the

Abominable Snowman or, after 1937, the Yeti. Whatever the various Wild Man figures of the Himalayan region meant to the various peoples and cultures of that region, British experts appropriated and amalgamated them into a figure that remains a part of the culture of the English-speaking world, appearing in everything from Christmas-special television programs to children's underwear.

There are few documents relating to the individuals who created the Sasquatch image, and there is no direct evidence that they were aware of the Abominable Snowman.

23, 1937; 17. Dollman, “The "Abominable Snowmen," Times, July 24, 1937; 13. Kaulback, The "Abominable Snowmen," Times, July 28, 1937; 15. Henry NEwman, “ The "Abominable Snowmen," Times, July 29, 1937; 15; F.W. Woods, “Giant Pandas And Snowmen,” Times, August 13, 1937; 8. F.S. Smythe, “ Abominable Snowmen Pursuit In The Himalayas, A Mystery Explained,” Times November 10, 1937, 18. "The Abominable Snowmen": A Tibetan Mystery Solved At Last,” Times, November 10, 1937; 18. R.I. Pocock, “The Abominable Snowmen,” The Times Thursday, November 11, 1937; 10. Balu, “Are The 'Snowmen' Bears? A Rival Investigator, Tracks On The Biafo Glacier,” Times, November 13, 1937; 13. Frank Smythe, “The Abominable Snowmen A Legend And Its Defenders, Mr. Smythe's Reply,” Times, November16, 1937; 17. F.W. Thomas, “The Abominable Snowmen The Bear As King Of Beasts,” Times. November 19, 1937; 12. 249 Yet given the prominence of the Snowman in the North American press and the similarities between the images, it is unlikely they are unrelated. Even if the creation of the Snowman image did not influence the creation of the Sasquatch image, they were still the products of a similar phenomenon, the appropriation of “Native” folklore by white members of the British Commonwealth.

In April of 1929, J. W. Burns, a white Indian agent and official at the Chehalis reservation, transformed the Wild Man in North America. Perhaps inspired by Franz

Boas’ work in the region, or the reports of Abominable Snowmen, Burns collected “old

Indian” stories about hairy wild men who lived in the region. The stories, which he published in MacLean's, the major Canadian news magazine, are in many ways typical of the Wild Man stories. The several Indians from various British Columbian reserves around the town of Agassiz, whose Wild Man stories Burn collected, describe the creature or creatures as “a man — a giant, no less than six and one-half feet in height, and covered with hair,” and commented, “except that he was covered with hair and twice the bulk of the average man, there was nothing to distinguish him from the rest of us.” The

Wild Men lived in caves and they were fierce and dangerous, frightening those who encountered them and even chasing them for miles. Yet in other ways the Wild Men of the Indian stories told of very different beings than the ones who populated North

American Wild Man stories in the previous century.52 While Burns or his informants did occasionally use the word Wild Man, Burns preferred to call them hairy giants or the term he coined from a conglomeration of native worlds, “Sasquatch.” They were not lone individuals but often appeared in families or groups. Unlike the mute Wild Man, they

52 J. W. Burns, “Introducing B.C.'s Hairy Giants,” Maclean's (April 1, 1929).

250 were able to speak certain Indian languages. What is more, these creatures also possessed supernatural powers. One man believed that after he shot a young Sasquatch, its mother cursed him and he was never able to shoot another animal.53

However, the most important difference between the classic Wild Man and Burns’ understanding of Sasquatch is that the Sasquatch was associated with native people. In

Burns' description, only natives knew of them, only native peoples encountered them, and they might very well be tribal Native Americans. He wrote repeatedly that Sasquatch was known to “old Indians” and that it was only because of Burns’ patience and close relationship with his Indian charges that he could learn about the creature. Burns ended his piece by stating, “Many Indians, besides those quoted, are sincerely convinced that the 'Sasquatch,' a few of them at least, still live in the little-known interior of the province.” But Burns hinted that not only did native peoples know of the Sasquatch, but that they were related, explaining that, “He [an Indian named Peter] wished to make it clear that these creatures were in no way related to the Indian.” To Burns, Peter’s denial of any relation only served to hint that the relationship did in fact exist. Likewise, Burns used the term “a tribe of hairy people” to hint at an Indian connection. Finally, one of the stories that Burns retells has a Sasquatch woman speaking in “the Douglas tongue,” the language spoken by the in-SHUCK-Ch nation of the northern portion of Harrison Lake.54

In a 1957 interview with the Vancouver Sun, Burns made it even more explicit that he understood the Sasquatch to be an Indian. Burns stated that the Sasquatch were of “Salish

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

251 decent” and that he knew why these “people of the Wilderness 'went wild'.”55 For Burns, the Sasquatch were a race of degenerate Indians.

Like the Abominable Snowman before it, the idea that native peoples believed in a tribe of giant hairy men inhabiting the forest and mountains, and that there might be some truth to such Indian superstitions, slowly captured the imagination of the public in both the United States and Canada. Following Burns' 1929 story, the next major rash of

Sasquatch stories appeared in 1934, when papers in British Columbia began to publish reports of Sasquatch terrorizing the native peoples in the Central Frazier Valley region where Burns was an Indian agent. The original newspaper accounts, some of which included Burn's informant, reported that the “Indian children stayed close to their mothers' apron strings, for the fearsome "Sasquatch" had returned to spread terror through peace-loving Chehalis tribes.” Soon after this story appeared in the American and Canadian press, two brothers, medical students at the University of California, organized an expedition to capture the “giant baby-snatcher of old.” Like the hundred of

Sasquatch hunting expeditions that followed it, the two brothers’ expedition seems to have come to naught.56

However, 1934 did see the further development of the Sasquatch image as created by Burns. Vancouver-based reporter Francis Dickie further developed the notion that the

Sasquatch were Cave Men. In his article entitled, “Are They the Last Cave Men,” Dickie argued that “the repeated reports of eyewitnesses of seeing one or more of the huge hairy

55 Alex MacGillivray, “'Shouldn't be captured', nothing monstrous about the Sasquatch says their pal,” Vancouver Sun, May 25, 1957.

56 “Luck To Sasquatch,” Washington Post, April 10, 1934, 8. “FABLED BABY-SNATCHER SOUGHT,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1934, 2 . “Giant Wildmen Reported Seen,” Washington Post, June 18, 1934. “Wild Men seen in Canada,” San Mateo Times, March 2, 1934, 1.

252 men in recent years, and more particularly in the last month... now seem to point strongly that the old tribal legend, long contemptuously flouted by the white man, is true.”

Emphasizing the primitive and mysterious nature of these creatures as a “Troglodyte race,” Dickie informed his readership that a fire appeared on a mountaintop that marked

“A return to a certain place of worship at some ancient shrine.”57 In 1935, a United Press article on the “Canadian Monster Man” also described them as the “remnants” of “a lost race of ‘wild men’ who inhabited the rocky regions of British Columbia.”58 By 1940, the

Winnipeg Free Press reported them as “cave men” or “a neolithic race of troglodytes.”59

The idea that Sasquatch constituted a lost race—a fusing of the Wild Man character,

Native American folklore, and the cave man image—fit well into the popular culture of

1930s and early 1940s North America. This culture saw heredity as a primary factor in explaining human difference and was eager to place peoples and races within hierarchical schemes of fitness and primitiveness.

While newspapermen were increasingly associating Sasquatch with cave men,

British Columbian Indian agents such as J.W. Burns, local town boosters, and possibly native peoples themselves continued to focus on the native connections to Sasquatch. In

1938 and 1939, the town of Harrison Hot Spring at the southern end of Lake Harrison in

British Columbia organized an event called “Indian Sasquatch days.” J.W. Burns, who was still an Indian Agent at the Chehalis reserve, obtained “special permission from the department of Indian affairs in Ottawa” to take “several hundred” of his “charges” to the

57 Francis Dickie “Are They the Last Cave Men?,” Lincoln (NE) Star, July 29, 3.

58 “Reports tell of Canadian monster men,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 3, 1935, 14.

59 Edger D. Smith, “Cavemen roam the Rockies,” Winnipeg Free Press, August 24, 1940, 31. “Sasquatch return frightens Indians in British Columbia,” Long Beach Independent, November 28, 1941, 15. 253 event a few miles away. Over two thousand Indians attended the event, and when the provincial official who gave the opening speech stated that Sasquatch did not exist, the audience booed him.60 While the Indian Sasquatch days festival did not last for many years, the international publicity of the stories from 1929, 1934 and the idea of using the

Sasquatch for publicity set the stage for the final development of the Wild Man image into that of Sasquatch and Big Foot.

The final transformation of the Wild Man figure was preceded by renewed interest in the Abominable Snowmen. In 1951, British exploration of the Himalayas in preparation for an assent of Mt. Everest began again after receiving permission from the

Nepalese to enter their country. While crossing the Menlung Glacier, expedition leader

Eric Shipton, another British climber, and sherpa Sen Tensing saw strange tracks in the snow which Tensing identified as “the tracks of 'yeti's' or 'abominable snowmen.'” In

December, the Times published Shipton's account of the tracks and Sen Tensing’s encounters with a yeti two years earlier. Tensing's description of the creatures as “half man, half beast, about five feet six inches tall covered in reddish brown hair,” along with

Shipton's photographs of the tracks, which appeared in the next day's issues of the Times, created an international sensation when both Newsweek and Life picked up the story.61

Having been granted legitimacy by the photographs of the footprints, the fame of Shipton and other mountaineers who vouched for the creature’s authenticity increased and the

60 “'WHOOPEE' WITH GRASS SKIRTS AND TOTEM POLES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1938, 6. “Indians Pay Homage to the Hairy Ones,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune, May 23, 1937, 4. C.V. Trench, “The Hairy Giants of British Columbia,” The Wide World: A Magazine for Men (January 1940).

61Eric Shipton, “Mystery Of Everest Footprints Of The "Abominable Snowman,” Times, December 6, 1951, 5. “Footprints Of The 'Abominable Snowman',” Times, December 7, 1951, 12. “Abominable Snowman,” Newsweek, December 17, 1951, 33. “Abominable Himalayan,” Life, December 31, 1951, 88.

254 Yeti’s existence remained the subject of legitimate scientific debate for many years to come.

Back in Canada, this renewed interest in the Yeti and the memory of Sasquatch stories from the 1930s and 1940s led a new generation of men to reexamine Wild Man stories from British Columbia. Early Sasquatch investigator William Marks wrote that he first heard about Sasquatch in 1934 from his father, who claimed he was told of the creature by “native Indians who lived across the Fraser River on the Agassiz side.” More importantly, Rene Dahinden, a Swiss emigrant to Canada, became interested in the Yeti after hearing about the footprints seen by Shipton. His employer, who had worked in

British Columbia during the Second World War, learned of his interest in the Yeti and told him about the Sasquatch stories from that region.62

Dahinden became so obsessed by the story of the Sasquatch that in 1954 he moved to British Columbia and devoted the rest of his life to the subject. In the summer of 1956, Dahinden and another man organized an expedition to the Chehalis Indian

Reservation around Harrison Lake in order to track down “the tribe of Indian Giants” when they returned to the area, supposedly “every four years for tribal rites.”63

Dahinden's conception of the Sasquatch was the same as Burns’, a race of primitive, hairy, giant Indians. While such a view was in tune with the racial politics and

62 William Marks, Tales of the Sasquatch (Polka dot series, v. 2, no. 2. Westbank, B.C.: W. Marks, 1971). Don Hunter, and René Dahinden, Sasquatch (New York: New American Library, 1975), 76. James Halpin, “Sasquatch,” Seattle Magazine (August 1970), 31-34, and 58-59. Two works have recently appeared chronicling the modern history of the Sasquatch, Yeti and Bigfoot: Joshua Blu Buhs, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Michael McLeod, Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

63 “Two Hunt Giant Indians,” Winnipeg Free Press, June 15, 1956, 1.

255 anthropology of the 1920s and 1930s when Burns proposed the theory, by the mid 1950s it was archaic.

For decades, Franz Boas and other anthropologists of his school had argued that culture was more important than heredity in explaining human difference. By the 1930s, the influence of Boaz was preeminent throughout the academy of social scientists as scholars committed to open opportunity for all, many from immigrant backgrounds, became increasingly prominent. By the end of the Second World War, the Great

Depression and then the horrors of the racialist worldview of the Nazis had fully discredited the notion that heredity could or should explain human difference. Even when in the late 1950s and early 1960s heredity returned to prominence among social scientists, it was largely free of racialist taint.64

While in the Fraser Valley area, Dahinden consulted with local newspaper reporter John Green and began the process that would transform the Sasquatch figure into something that was more acceptable to contemporary cultural values. While Green knew he lived in an “area occupied by Mr. Burns' Sasquatch” and went so far as to write “an

‘April Fool’ story for my paper about one of the hairy monsters kidnapping a beautiful guest from the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel,” he tried to dissuade Dahinden of the creature’s existence. Dahinden left the area, but his visit had renewed community interest in the local legend. The next year, the village of Harrison Hot Springs received funds for a project that would commemorate the hundredth anniversary of British Columbia. While brainstorming about what to do with the funds, the village council decided to use the money to fund a Sasquatch hunt. Dahinden returned to town and while the Continental

64 Delger, 61, 191, 200-204, 215. Jacobson, 99. McLaren, 168.

256 Committee rejected the proposal for a time before finally offering a five thousand dollar reward for the creature’s capture, the proposed hunt generated tremendous publicity for the tiny village. According to Green, “It was, of course, a bid for publicity, and it was tremendously successful. Papers all over Canada played the story on the front page....

There were numerous offers from would be Sasquatch hunters, even from young ladies prepared to act as bait.”65 The publicity of the centennial Sasquatch hunt raised the prominence of the figure to new heights, but this publicity also paved the ways for its transformation.

As a result of their key role in the centennial Sasquatch hunt, Green and Dahinden received information about several other individuals who had encountered the Sasquatch.

Some of the stories were from native peoples, some were from old newspaper stories like the Jacko story of 1884, and others were from non-native Canadians. For Green, the fact that non-Indians had seen the creature greatly bolstered his belief that the creature existed and that it was something other than a giant, hairy, degenerated Indian. Instead, Green and Dahinden came to believe that the Sasquatch was a kind of animal, perhaps a bipedal ape.66 When large tracks appeared in the woods of northern California in 1958, accompanied by vague sightings of something large and hairy, Green argued that the creature, called “Bigfoot,” was another giant bipedal ape just like Sasquatch.67

65 John Green, On the track of the Sasquatch (Agassiz, British Columbia: Cheam Publishing Ltd., 1969), 1- 8. Hunter and Dahinden, 77-83. Winnipeg Free Press, March 5, 1957, 41. Winnipeg Free Press, May 1, 1957, 6. Winnipeg Free Press, April 1, 1957, 15. Winnipeg Free Press, April 12, 1957, 5. Allen Roy Evans, “The Hairy Giants.” New York Times, September 29, 1957, 139.

66 Buhs, 62-64.

67 Buhs, 66-87. 257 The Wild Man, the animal-like human, was now finally and fully a human-like animal. Since the late fifties, the Sasquatch figure has undergone numerous permeations and has become increasingly popular, a story that has been well chronicled by others.

Whatever the meanings that the Sasquatch/Bigfoot took on in American culture—an object of fear or desire, the foundation of a subculture, the subject of scientific inquiry, or an embodiment of nature—it was very different than that of the American Wild Man. It was not a cultural manifestation of the permeability of human nature and the human body to the natural world, but rather an embodiment of that which remained unknowable in the world and the limits of human knowledge.

258

CONCLUSION.

Americans believed in Wild Men for as long as they inhabited a world in which it was possible for a human being to be shaped and transformed by the environment. The

American belief in Wild Men was premised on environmentalism and the permeability of the human body to the environment. Centuries of stories and scientific and medical knowledge all informed Americans’ conviction that there were such beings as Wild Men.

The market revolution, democratization of knowledge and westward expansion in the

1840s raised the figure to new prominence. As the intellectual and cultural understandings that were the foundation of that belief began to weaken in the last decades of the nineteenth century, so too did the existence of Wild Men in American culture.

When germ theory and medical universalism replaced environmental medicine and medical specificity, they undermined the broader doctrine of environmentalism upon which the Wild Man figure rested. When doctors pathologized wild behavior, they changed its meaning and, in confining those they deemed mentally ill in state asylums, they physically removed peoples who could be seen as Wild Men from outdoor spaces.

The triumph of hereditarianism during the early decades of the twentieth century finally spelled the end of the American Wild Man. It had become impossible for Americans to imagine that if exposed to the power of wild nature they might under go such an enormous transformation. As American environmentalism vanished or was replaced by

259 the idea that culture was the most important external influence upon human beings, the

Wild Man disappeared with it.

But even as the Wild Man stopped making sense in modernizing American culture, the figure did not completely disappear. Other images could evoke the Wild Man without sharing all of its meanings. The caveman as a hairy, powerful person with a club made sense to twentieth-century white Americans because it invoked the familiar iconography of the Wild Man. Americans could accept the fictions of Tarzan and Joseph

Knowles because they already knew that a life in the wilderness resulted in a powerful body. Finally, even as white Americans ceased to imagine that someone like them could become a hairy creature, some people continued to see something out there in the forest.

Thus Sasquatch, a figure almost identical to a Wild Man but lacking his humanity, stepped into his footprints.

The narrative of the Wild Man is also about much more than the figure’s rise and fall. I turned to the story of the Wild Man in America because I hoped to tell a different type of story about American environmental thought. I wished to write about non-elite

Americans and understand how they saw the environment and its meaning in their own lives, so I turned to a set of beliefs submerged in folktales, reminiscences, and the pages of obscure books and even more obscures newspapers. I explored the Wild Man in

American culture because I believed there was no better way of uncovering otherwise hidden aspects of the place of nature in American culture. Yet as this project has unfolded, I realized the Wild Man reveals more than just a popular and folk vision of the relationship between people and the natural world.

260 The belief in Wild Men was the greatest manifestation of American environmentalist thinking. It was evidence of an anxiety about the degenerative impact of the environment far beyond concerns about disease or even loss of racial identity. It posited that humanity itself was mutable in the face of environmental influence. What was at stake was not merely an individual’s health but his or her membership in the community of human beings.

The American Wild Man offers a window into the often unspoken assumptions about what it meant to be human in America. For some in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “humanity” did not rest in heredity or metaphysics but rather stemmed from a social and physical environment that made it possible. Thus, Americans’ belief in Wild Men suggests that the meaning of “human” varies across place and time and should be treated as a social construct as complicated as race or gender.

Wild Men—unlike savages seen as distant in place, culture and race—were a proximate “other,” an insider transformed and inverted yet still living at the margins of both the community and wild nature: literally in the backyard. Encounters between Wild

Men and Americans took place or were imagined to take place in all sorts of uncontrolled spaces such as river banks, woodlots or mountain sides. In any location where Americans encountered wildness, peoples, and ecologies that were outside of community control, they might encounter a Wild Man. These encounters had consequences, both for the communities that saw Wild Men and for the individuals they saw as Wild Men. The inscription of the Wild Man image onto an individual was an act of objectification that rendered him or her subject to inhuman treatment. Americans’ interactions with Wild

261 Men, including hunting, arresting, institutionalizing, or redeeming them, were all attempts to impose control on the uncontrolled.

The Wild Man in America bound together two concepts: wild places and wild human action. Thus the narrative of the Wild Man is a story about how Americans understood humanness to be the product of the environment; but it is also about how

Americans understood the non-human environment in social terms. Wildness was not about the agency of nature but rather the absence of agency of the social order. Anything could be wild—a man, a pig, a landscape—because anything could be dislocated from the control and authority of society. If we understand wildness as a social condition and all landscapes as social landscapes, then we can begin to understand the violence, objectification and care that Mason Evans, the Wild People of the Navidad, Joseph Israel

Lobdell, the Wild Woman of the Watchita, and others all experienced. They were outside and apart from the community and therefore objects of a violent attempt at reintegrating them.

There are no more Wild Men in America. We have taken all of our wild animality and given it a made up Indian name, “Sasquatch,” and said that it is not us. I wonder if we have lost something in the exchange. Individuals seen as Wild suffered objectification, violence and cruelty. But the image of the Wild Man was more an embodiment of that objectification than the cause. Perhaps we miss what the Wild Man told Americans about ourselves, our society and the world that surrounds us. To believe in the Wild Man is to recognize that we are blended beings: a mixture of internal agency and the agency of the world we inhabit. The most important characteristic of the Wild

Man was that he belonged to the society that saw him. He was an “us” transformed and

262 inverted. Thus every American could share his fate; everyone was vulnerable to the environment that produced him. No matter how cruelly Americans treated Wild Men, that cruelty emanated from an acknowledgement that they could share the same fate.

Americans hunted, confined and sought to redeem Wild Men because they recognized the common vulnerability of their humanity.

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