Part of an ongoing weekly series about Alaskan history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaskan history or an idea for a future article? Fill out the form at the bottom of this story.
To win an argument against a Frenchman, you have to produce a moose. That may sound like the worst attempt at an aphorism, but it is how Thomas Jefferson once defended American honor and handled an academic dispute. This article may not be about Alaska, but it does focus on a subject that Alaskans know all too well: the 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 the Count Buffon, was a French naturalist and author, one of the most acclaimed scholars of his generation. Although he was now less well regarded, in his time he was considered a worthy colleague of intellectual heavyweights such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Buffon’s masterpiece was a 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. Everyone with the slightest literary or intellectual pretensions owned copies. The volumes of the “Histoire Naturelle” were among the best-selling books of the 18th century. Short chapters on specific species make up the bulk of the series: larks followed by singers, and so on. But he also included some more general treatises on the natural world, especially his theory of the degeneration of animals and humans on the North and South American continents.
Buffon believed that the animals and people of the American continents were degenerate compared to those elsewhere. His use of degeneracy does not refer to the immoral meaning of the term, but rather that the animals and people were inferior: smaller, weaker, and less productive. The animal record was his primary evidence. For example, he noted that big cats in America were smaller and “more cowardly” than lions. He also argued that the absence of elephants, camels, rhinoceroses, and giraffes in America meant that “living nature is there much less active, much less varied, and we may even say, less strong.” Furthermore, 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 eastern coast of North America, which in the later years of Buffon’s life became a new, independent nation.
Buffon’s self-aggrandizing theory—given its continental origins—was far from new and far from the last of its kind. Variants had existed since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, who believed that lands outside the author’s own possessed inferior fauna, flora, and inhabitants. When Queen Isabella of Spain, from the Ferdinand and Isabella that sent Christopher Columbus westward, first heard reports of the new in her world, she remarked, “This country, where the trees are not firmly rooted, must breed men of little truthfulness, and still less steadfastness.” 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 partly influenced by Buffon in his 1837 text “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” when he wrote: “America has always shown herself physically and spiritually impotent, and does so to this day.”
As for the animals of America, Buffon was not aware of or had a good understanding of the caribou, greater bears, musk oxen, elk, and bison. Of elk in particular, Buffon wrote dismissively that they were “considerably smaller in America than in Europe, and that without exception.” It is worth noting that the French nobleman never visited America. Instead, he relied on the stories of others, sometimes no better than rumors. At some point the insult to the United States became too obvious. That’s how Thomas Jefferson came in.
By the early 1880s, the future president was aware of Buffon’s claims and was appalled by their apparent critical flaws, including the quality of data collection. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson’s only complete book, he heavily criticized the theory of American degeneration. Specifically of Buffon he wrote: “More eloquence than sound reasoning has been exhibited in support of this theory; that it is one of those cases where the verdict has been seduced by a red-hot pen.
Jefferson spent most of 1784 through 1789 in France as a trade negotiator and eventually as official U.S. minister to France. The posting gave him more direct opportunities to rebut Buffon and his supporters; Notes on the State of Virginia was first published anonymously in Paris in 1785. In 1786, Jefferson even dined at Buffon’s home, where the count acknowledged a minor taxonomic error but otherwise refused to change his views on American degeneracy.
Jefferson had argued like a scientist up to this point, with measurements, animal skins, and fossil data, but had been consistently rejected in small and insignificant ways, if not ignored altogether. He needed a little more shock and awe to change the European mindset, an individually spectacular response that could not be ignored. He needed a specimen so large and grand that it would uniquely counter arguments about small American wildlife. As any Alaskan would understand, he chose a moose. But he needed a real moose, not notes or antlers, which were sent to France.
Elk were a particularly suitable target because Buffon did not believe they existed as a species of their own, but that they had been miscategorized as reindeer. And for a Virginian, Jefferson was an expert on elk. At that time, he had been doing research on moose himself for a number of years. Before leaving for France, he sent surveys to his colleagues — the statesman and prolific letter writer had many colleagues — about elk 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 the crossing of the Delaware River in Washington, wrote to Jefferson in January 1787 with the good news. He had an elk in mind, but not in his hand. In his excitement, he wrote to Jefferson somewhat prematurely. If he had known what difficulties lay ahead, he might have waited.
At the time of that letter, the elk in question lay dead in remote Vermont. From there, it took 14 days and the clearing of a 20-mile road in the midst of a particularly nasty winter for the moose to arrive at Sullivan’s home. Furthermore, in his eagerness to help Jefferson, Sullivan had not taken into account his complete lack of training as a taxidermist. Once prepared, the moose still required a long sea journey 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 almost disastrous for Sullivan. He had to borrow money from his brother for transportation. In a detailed expense report he wrote: “I charge only the expenses which I paid out of pocket, without any expense to myself, which has been very considerable.”
Jefferson finally received the object of his desires in late September. The elk, once a striking example of its kind, was a shabby collection of skin and bones after months of questionable taxidermy and shipping delays. It was more kit than specimen. Sullivan had managed to save most of the skeleton, except for the head and antlers. As for the head, he wrote, “the skin being whole and well dressed, it can be pulled on at pleasure,” an uninspiring option. Replacement antlers were provided, which “can be fixed on at one’s pleasure.” Worse, as Sullivan wrote, “the skin of the elk was covered with the hair upon it, but a great part of it has come off, 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-sized, stuffed moose. In appearance, it was certainly less than it might have been. As connected as Jefferson was, it was unlikely that he would convince someone else to kill, stuff, and ship a moose to France on his behalf, so he did. An Alaskan today might wonder how many diseases the moose had before it died, but it must have been a shocking sight to Europeans of the time.
[Mystery meat of 1951: Did an exclusive club eat a frozen woolly mammoth from the Aleutians?]
The elk was duly delivered to the count. In a letter to Daniel Webster, Jefferson wrote that Buffon “promised in his next volume to put these matters right.” But the Frenchman gave no answer, neither a rude insult, nor a formal rebuttal, nor an apology. In fact, he died within six months of the moose’s arrival. There is certainly no causal link between the two events, although it is funny to imagine that the sight of an American moose sent the Frenchman into a death spiral of shame and remorse. American pride had demanded a response; maybe this was it.
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Main sources:
Dugatkin, Lee Alan. Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Elk: Natural History in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Gerbi, Antonello. The New World Dispute: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes about the state of Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.
Webster, Fletcher, editor. The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Part 1. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1857.