Part of the sequel weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.
To win an argument against a Frenchman, produce a moose. This might sound like the worst attempt at creating an aphorism, but this is how Thomas Jefferson once defended American honor and settled an academic dispute. This article may not feature Alaska, but it focuses on a topic Alaskans know all too well: moose. And Alaskans today certainly know far more about moose than any European scholar in the eighteenth century.
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), in English Count Buffon, was a French naturalist and writer, one of the most respected scholars of his generation. Although less recognized now, in his day, he was considered a worthy peer of intellectual heavyweights such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Buffon’s masterpiece was the 36-volume “Histoire Naturelle: Générale et Particulière”, a mineral and zoological encyclopedia published between 1749 and 1788.
Written in an engaging and often poetic style, each volume was a cultural sensation, repeatedly reprinted and translated into several other languages. Anyone with the slightest literary or intellectual pretensions owned copies. The “Histoire Naturelle” volumes were among the best-selling books of the 18th century. Most of the series consists of short chapters on specific animal species: larks followed by warblers and so on. However, he also included some more general treatises on the natural world, especially his theory of the degeneration of animals and man on the North and South American continents.
Buffon believed that the animals and indigenous people of the American continents were degenerate compared to those elsewhere. His use of degeneration does not refer to the immoral meaning of the term, but to the fact that animals and humans were inferior: smaller, weaker, and less fertile. The animal record was his primary evidence. For example, he noted how the big cats in America were smaller and more “cowardly” than lions. Similarly, he argued that the absence of elephants, camels, rhinoceroses and giraffes in the Americas means: “So the living nature there is much less active, much less diverse, and we might even say less powerful. Moreover, he argued that species transplanted to America from elsewhere would necessarily degenerate. The negative implications of this were not lost on the inhabitants of certain British colonies along the North American east coast, some of which became a new, independent nation in the later years of Buffon’s life.
Buffon’s self-aggrandizing theory – given his continental origins – was far from new and far from the last of its kind. Variants have existed since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, believing that the lands beyond the author’s borders had inferior fauna, flora, and inhabitants. When Queen Isabella of Spain, of the line of Ferdinand and Isabella, who sent Christopher Columbus to the west, heard the first news of the new for her world, she remarked, “This land, where the trees are not firmly rooted, must produce men of little truth and truthfulness.” less permanence.” The English poet John Donne (1571/1572–1631) described America as “that unripe side of the earth.” And the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was at least partially influenced by Buffon in his 1837 text “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” when he wrote, “America has always shown itself physically and spiritually impotent and continues to do so today.
As for animals in the Americas, Buffon did not know or lacked a proper understanding of caribou, larger bears, muskox, elk, and bison. Specifically, of moose, Buffon wrote scornfully that they are “considerably smaller in America than in Europe, without exception.” It is worth noting that the French nobleman never visited America. Instead, he relied on reports from others, sometimes no better than hearsay. At some point, the offense against the United States was all too clear. Thus entered Thomas Jefferson.
By the early 1780s, the future president was familiar with Buffon’s claims and was dismayed by apparent critical failures, including the quality of data collection. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson’s only full-length book, he strongly criticized the theory of American degeneration. Regarding Buffon specifically, he wrote: “More eloquence than sound reasoning has been displayed in support of this theory; that this is one of those cases where judgment has been seduced by a luminous pen.’
Jefferson spent most of the years 1784 to 1789 in France as a trade negotiator and eventually as the official American minister to France. The posting allowed him more direct opportunities to refute Buffon and his followers; “Notes on the State of Virginia” was first published anonymously in 1785 in Paris. In 1786, Jefferson even dined at Buffon’s house, where the count acknowledged a minor taxonomic error but otherwise refused to change his convictions about American degeneracy.
Jefferson has thus far argued as a scientist with measurements, animal skins, and the fossil record, but he has been consistently refuted in small and minor ways, if not completely ignored. He needed a little more shock and awe to move European thought forward, an individually spectacular response that could not be ignored. He needed a specimen so large and magnificent that it would uniquely defy arguments about the tiny American wilderness. As any Alaskan will understand, he settled on the lot. But he needed a real moose, not notes or antlers, sent to France.
Moose were a particularly suitable target as Buffon did not believe they existed as their own species, thinking they were instead misclassified as reindeer. And for the people of Virginia, Jefferson was an expert on elk. At that time, he had already been researching moose on his own for several years. Before leaving for France, he sent out surveys to his colleagues—the statesman and prolific letter writer had many colleagues—regarding moose with questions about their behavior and size. Among his respondents was John Sullivan, a general during the American Revolution and future governor of New Hampshire.
Sullivan, who had been present at Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River among other battles, wrote Jefferson in January 1787 with good news. He meant moose, if not in hand. In his excitement he wrote to Jefferson somewhat prematurely. If he had known the trouble to come, he might have waited.
As of this letter, the elk in question lay dead in faraway Vermont. From there, it took 14 days and clearing 20 miles of road in the middle of a remarkably nasty winter for the moose to arrive at Sullivan’s home. Furthermore, in his eagerness to help Jefferson, Sullivan failed to take into account his complete lack of training as a taxidermist. Once the lot was ready, it still needed a long sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to England and then to the French port of Le Havre and from there to Paris.
The considerable cost of the project was closer to nothing for Sullivan than not. He had to borrow money from his brother for the transport. In a detailed report of expenses, he wrote: “I only account for expenses that I paid in cash, without any problems of my own, which were very considerable.”
Jefferson finally received the object of his desires in late September. The elk, once a striking example of its species, was a shambolic assortment of skin and bones after months of questionable taxidermy and shipping delays. It was more of a kit than a specimen. Sullivan managed to preserve most of the skeleton except for the head and antlers. Regarding the head, he wrote, “Skin is whole and well dressed, can be drawn on at will,” an uninspiring option. Included was a spare set of antlers that “can be deployed at will”. Worse still, as Sullivan wrote, “the moose skin was clothed with hair, but much of it has shrunk and the rest is ready to fall off.”
From this assortment of moose pieces, the author of the Declaration of Independence was able to reconstruct a full stuffed moose. On the face of it, it was definitely less than it could be. As connected as Jefferson was, it was unlikely that he would have convinced another person to kill, prepare and ship the elk to France on his behalf, so he did. Today’s Alaskan might wonder how many diseases the moose had before it died, but to Europeans it must have been a startling sight.
[Mystery meat of 1951: Did an exclusive club eat a frozen woolly mammoth from the Aleutians?]
The lot was duly delivered to the count. In a letter to Daniel Webster, Jefferson wrote that Buffon “promised to set these things right in his next volume.” But the Frenchman made no reply, neither an insult, nor a formal rebuttal, nor an apology for capitulation. More to the point, he died within six months of the elk’s arrival. There is certainly no causal connection between the two events, although it is amusing to imagine that the sight of an American moose sent the French into a death spiral of shame and remorse. American pride demanded an answer; maybe that was it.
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Key resources:
Dugatkin, Lee Alan. Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: A History of Nature in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Gerbi, Antonello. The New World Controversy: A History of Controversy, 1750-1900. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.
Jefferson, Thomas. Virginia State Notes. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.
Webster, Fletcher, editor. The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Volume 1. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1857.