Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (10 page)

Puritans were not alone in finding monsters on the American frontier. Sea serpents swam in many American waters, and strange beasts populated the wilderness that surrounded most new American settlements. But the American response to the monsters they met was not uniform and did not always share the Puritan desire to destroy the monster and cleanse the American landscape. Some even saw the monster as a strange partner in mastering the unruly frontier.

Mastering Frontier Monsters

A practice known variously as “noodling,” “ bumming,” “tickling,” or “grabbling” still maintains some limited popularity in the American South and Midwest. Skilled noodlers reach into rivers, their fingers
exploring crevices where large, sometimes gigantic, male catfish guard thousands of eggs recently laid by females. The noodlers soon find their hands in the gullet of an enormous and angry fish. Wrenching the creature out of the water in a feat of strength, they both catch their supper and prove their masculinity to the small cadre of fellow noodlers who view this as both sport and initiation ritual. Expert noodlers show off their deeply scarred forearms as proof of their skill.
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The roots of this strange pastime are planted firmly in rural traditions of masculinity that are very much a part America’s frontier experience. It draws on a fund of folklore about the monstrous beings that swim America’s waters. Through this act noodlers perform an ancient rite that displays masculine strength. Mastery over the monster represents mastery over the American landscape itself.

Persistent tales of catfish that grow to extraordinary lengths and exhibit primal viciousness have a long history in American folklore. Stories of fish in the Ohio River that were able to pull human beings into the watery blackness never to be seen again circulated in the late colonial era. Perhaps the earliest tale of these river monsters comes from French explorers Marquette and Jolliet, who claimed that in 1673 a giant creature slammed into one of their canoes near what is today Peoria, Illinois. The explorers later insisted that the incident had occurred after local Native Americans warned them of a demon that lived beneath local waters that would “drag them into the abyss.” In 1780 a Moravian missionary who had come to minister to new settlements along the Ohio River reported a giant catfish that dragged fishermen to their deaths. Into the twentieth century, such stories continued to exert a powerful hold on the imagination. A rural legend from Caseyville, Kentucky, tells of the remains of a human baby found in the gullet of one of the river monsters.
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Belief in frontier monsters drew on European folklore and the tendency for frontier communities to produce legendary materials out of the shadowy forests and lakes that surrounded them. But in late colonial America, the question of monsters became a matter of national pride. A debate raged in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world over the theory of “American degeneracy.” According to some European natural scientists, including the influential French thinker Buffon, the climatic conditions in the New World produced animals and human beings markedly inferior to their European counterparts. While Buffon did not extend this theory to European settlers themselves (though he came close), he certainly believed native peoples to be a degenerate race.
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The theory of the degeneracy of America can be read as cultural propaganda masquerading as scientific theory. Colonial thinkers,
including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, responded with cultural propaganda of their own, arguing that, in fact, the American continent had produced gigantic, powerful, and brutal creatures unlike anything anyone had seen on the continent of Europe. The American wilderness, they asserted, had produced monsters. And American monsters had to be bigger than anyone else’s.

This discussion had the effect of reopening the debate over the meaning of Cotton Mather’s “giant’s bones” in Claverack, New York, while also setting off a wave of fossil collection that made the American mastodon a matter for significant public discussion. The collecting of fossils in Kentucky’s “Big Bone Lick” and near Niagara Falls, New York, became a passion among amateur paleontologists. During the American Revolution, the bones of the “Incognitum” (the mastodon or woolly mammoth) became what historian of science Paul Semonin has called “an emblem of national honor.”
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Even George Washington, in one of the most difficult periods of the Revolutionary War, took time out to go fossil hunting. In 1780 Washington established the headquarters of the Continental Army near West Point, New York, as he contemplated an attack on the British stronghold at New York City. A snowfall in December gave him the opportunity to travel to a nearby farm where another “giant tooth” had been discovered. Washington, according to an aide-de- camp who joined him on the outing, claimed that, at Mount Vernon, he had similar specimens collected from the Ohio River Valley.
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Thomas Jefferson’s 1781 draft of
Notes on the State of Virginia
, a natural history survey of his home state, discussed the fossils of the mastodon in detail. Jefferson sought to refute the claims of European scientists who suggested that the bones belonged to either an elephant or a hippopotamus. “The skeleton of the mammoth,” he wrote, “bespeaks an animal of six times the cubic volume of the elephant.” The creature was not only the largest that had ever shaken the American continent with its lumbering stride but, Jefferson insisted, “the largest of all terrestrial beings.”
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Some American thinkers saw the fossil finds as further proof of the biblical account of Noahic giants rather than simply an emblem of national superiority. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University from 1778 to 1795, at first refused to accept the contention that gigantic teeth unearthed in America belonged to a creature anything like a mastodon. Stiles instead embraced what he called the “Doctrine of Monsters,” the belief that anomalies like gigantic fossils proved that the biblical world of wonders existed on the American landscape. Writing about Washington’s
visit to view fossils in New York, Stiles admitted that most natural scientists “take these bones to belong to Quadrupeds.” He insisted, to the contrary, that they belonged to giant humans, “like the bones and teeth at Claverack” that had fascinated Mather. Stiles, a major intellectual celebrity in the early American republic, shows that Mather still had plenty of disciples for this view, bringing together as it did the biblical history and the history of the new nation.
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Stiles would eventually reject this idea after a long correspondence with Jefferson. Nevertheless, his doctrine of monsters received new life in a popular account of the Kentucky territory that portrayed the fossil finds at Big Bone Lick as uncovering the remains of a true American horror. John Filson’s 1793
The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky
, popular both in the United States and in France, portrayed the mastodon as “the tyrant of the forest, perhaps the devourer of man.”
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Filson’s strange travelogue used gothic imagery to recreate the frontier landscape as land of Native American graves, unquiet spirits, and the bones of monstrous creatures. He imagined the herbivorous mastodon as a raging carnivore and suggested that native peoples had to form a large political confederation in order to stamp out the creature that would otherwise have brought about “the extinction of the whole race of animals from the system of nature.” Filson had extrapolated from the mastodon fossil finds a secret and terrifying history of the American continent in which Lovecraftian beings had once been a terror to humans.
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Filson not only regenerated the doctrine of monsters, he produced the first series of stories about Daniel Boone. Boone was an actual historical character, a Native American fighter and land surveyor who gobbled up vast tracts of land on the Kentucky frontier in the late eighteenth century. Filson, who had accompanied Boone on an expedition through the Cumberland Gap in search of settlement sites, transformed him into America’s first frontier hero, a subduer of nature on a wild and brutal frontier.
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Filson’s mythic language contained a brutal reality about early American history. Boone, and men like him, did spill out through the Appalachians in the late eighteenth century, killing and dispersing native peoples. In national mythology, Boone became an archetypal symbol for American masters of the frontier, winning out over a brutal nature that had once been the home of “the tyrant of the forests.” Like the noodlers that are their latter-day progeny, early American settlers set out to become masters of the savage beasts of the frontier.

As the nineteenth century approached, many Americans exerted a different kind of mastery. The enslavement of Africans had been part of
the American experiment from the very beginning as the Virginia colony introduced the slave system as a replacement for the limited duration of white indentured servanthood. Justifications of slavery on the basis of the inferiority of the African race became increasingly common as the eighteenth century progressed.

Slavery became interwoven with the prosperous economic systems of the southern states. Proslavery apologists increasingly turned to the image of the monster to make their case. Even Thomas Jefferson, known for his anxiety over slavery and his condemnation of the international slave trade, still argued in
Notes on the State of Virginia
for the inferiority of Africans. Jefferson never definitively asserted that this represented a true biological inferiority, leaving open the possibility that African people had been “made distinct by time and circumstances.” He certainly assented to the belief that African people “are inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind.”
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Racism became a new doctrine of monsters in America. Although basing most of his suppositions about African American inferiority on skin color (an aesthetic argument that assumed the superior beauty of white and even of the “tawny” skin of native peoples over the African), Jefferson also borrowed the monster tales of the exploration of Africa. Dismissing Buffon’s notions of American degeneracy, he freely borrowed the French writer’s discussion of giant African apes mating with African women. In one especially startling passage, he suggested that even African people recognized the superiority of the “flowing hair” and “more elegant symmetry of form” of the whites. He then compared this to the way the “Oran-ootan” showed its preference “for black women over those of their own species.” Paul Semonin comments that Jefferson in this passage “equated the alleged ardor of black males for white women with aberrant sexual behavior in the animal world.”
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Race and slavery became productive of all kinds of monster tales. Terrifying creatures emerged out of the terrifying realities of the slave trade, forced immigrations taking place over several centuries. America would be unable to live with the creature it created, and the enslaved found themselves in the maw of a monster.

Ghosts of the Trade

The Atlantic slave trade became the engine that drove the first global economy, the triangular trade that brought enormous wealth to the European powers and fueled colonization and settlement in the New World. The trade in slaves had its beginnings in the late fifteenth century, as early Portuguese explorers, hunting for gold, formed treaties
with coastal African merchants to trade metals, guns, and gunpowder for slaves from the African interior. This process disrupted state building in West Africa, setting off round after round of slaving wars between African ethnic groups. As Portuguese and Spanish power waned, Holland, and eventually England, seized control of the trade.
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Many of the Africans caught up in the trade came from deep in the interior of West Africa. Slavers marched some of their victims as far as one thousand miles to reach European fortresses built at the mouth of the great West African rivers. The enslaved received a brand, not unlike cattle, that marked them with the national symbol of Dutch or English joint stock companies. Placed in the holds of ships that sometimes had as little as eighteen inches of height between decks, the enslaved Africans suffocated, committed suicide, or were driven insane by the fetid conditions and the terror of their plight. Slave ships assumed a loss of as much as 30 percent of their cargo as part of operating costs.
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The slave ship became a kind of charnel house, haunted with both the reality and the memory of violence. One observer described the deck of an eighteenth-century slave ship as “so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughterhouse.” Historian Marcus Rediker has called the slave ship “a well organized fortress for the control of human beings” in which any attempt at insurrection resulted in brutal retribution. Failed slave rebels found themselves “flogged, pricked, cut, razored, stretched, broken, unlimbed and beheaded.” Slave captains often distributed the body parts of the defeated to the rest of their human cargo as a reminder of the punitive cost of an attempted rebellion.
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The slave ships represented true houses of horror, machines of torture. Not surprisingly, the forced African diaspora into the New World generated mountains of monster lore that reflected the terrors of the trade. As Oloudah Equiono describes in his reconstruction of the experience of the trade, captives felt they had “fallen into a world of bad spirits.” African folklore associated the color white with death, giving an aura of supernatural terror to the creatures that enslaved, beat, and branded them.
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