Appendix B. Hunting Elephants in the Oregon Country

Appendix B

The following stoiy appeared in Days & Deeds. in the Oregon Country by John Homer in 1928. Dr. Horner'sfloweiy writing style is typical of the period and greatly embellished the facts as remembered by Elvera Glender Muller. In fact, the cadets were not allowed to dig in the spring for fear it would cave in and be ruined. ... [Jan Meranda]

Hunting Elephants in the Oregon Country

Hunting elephants in the Oregon Country is a delightful sport.

Some years ago, a Benton County, Oregon, matron said to her husband, "Send a man to clean the spring; the dunking water's bad."

The husband, unable to detect a bad taste in the water, failed to comply with his wife's wishes. Naturally she was disappointed, so, upon his return from work at the close of the day, she greeted him with a withering look. My friend, did you ever face a withering look? If so, you know how the man felt who did not obey his wife.

But, to make amends, he sent two men the next day. Soon their spades struck huge bones in the spring. These were pried up and piled on the bank. Then there caine teeth, each weighing several pounds, which delighted the wife, who felt all the time she was in the right. The teeth were many thousand times as large as yours--an interesting fact when you consider that a toothache may be the cause of acute misery. You should, therefore multiply your toothache by a thousand or ten thousand to get a fair idea of the tooth troubles of an elephant.

Presently the workmen came to a tusk weighing a hundred pounds. It was as big around as a stovepipe. Very big to be sure; yet tusks are but teeth overgrown. Overgrown eye-teeth are called tushes, and teeth much larger than tushes are called tusks. In the language of the old-time school-master, one might say: "Positive, tooth; comparative, tush; superlative, tusk."

When the husband returned that evening the wife met him with a smile of triumph. Then, putting her little hand around his strong arm, as you have seen someone do, she led him gently to the spring, and, pointing to the bones, said, "So you see, Husband, we have been drinking elephant soup."

This incident seems as incredible as myths. of giants and fairies, yet it took place within sixteen miles of the Oregon State Agricultural College in the year 1919.

COLLEGE STUDENTS SPEND A DAY iN ELEPHANT LAND

The discovery led to an elephant hunt in which a hundred cadets and half as many "cadetines" joined, with picks, shovels, kodaks and luncheons. These young explorers had

I. Mastodon. 2. Broad-faced O. 3. Three-toed Rorses. 4. Tapirs. 5. Saber-toothed Tiger. 6. Oregon RhinoceroS. 7. Elephant. 8. Camels and Dromedaries. Insert, ReptIe.

scarcely left the campus, however, when a workman shoed them a portion of an elephant head which he had dug up within two blocks of the mayor's mansion. Imagine, in a college city [Corvailis], an elephant and a mayor, that followed the same trail towards the Willamette river every morning, with the probable difference that the elephant always got a drink.

Soon after their arrival at the spring, the cadets dug a trench large enough ton contain a railway freight car, and exposed more elephant bones. Everyone shared in the excitement of the discovery except a fine-looking pioneer, who was in deep study.

He bore the appearance of one who depends more upon his own opinion that on books--a custom not uncommon among old-timers. His long beard reached to his waist. It was snowy white, with the exception of a small patch about his mouth which had been discolored by tobacco. He was smoking a corncob pipe which he called "Old Faithful" because it was in almost constant action. When asked what he thought of the discovery, he slowly peered through the smoke of "Old Faithful" and said: "I can't understand how a great bill of flesh every crawled under the spring, now covered with trees."

Yet, the elephant lived long before the fir trees grew about the spring, for, at that time Oregon was a land of palms, with a tropical or sub-tropical climate, and there were no first, cedars nor pine trees here. Hence, the age in which the elephant lived must have been very long ago.

ELEPHANTS ONCE NUMEROUS IN OREGON

While homeward bound, the elephant hunters were shown a mastodon tooth found a few miles to the westward of the spring. Someone pointed out the Robert Glass farm, from which remains of two elephants were excavated more than forty years ago. These incidents, all of which occurred within a single county, helped to strengthen the belief that elephants were once common in Oregon.

A few days later, a fishing party, near Ingram Ferry on the Willamette about ten miles from the spring, found the tusks of an elephant in the east bank of the river.

Some bathers discovered the remains of mastodon and elephants in Chehalem Creek at Newberg in June, 1924.

Near Dayton, Oregon, is a historic barn built by General Joel Palmer. Here went the groomed steeds of Capt. U. S. Grant, Lieut. Phil Sheridan, Capt. Auger, General Stevens and other noted men who were entertained by General Palmer. A portion of the barn has been converted into a museum for the exhibition and preservation of fossil remains of a mammoth, a mastodon, a ground sloth, and other huge animals, some of which were collected from the bed of Palmer Creek during the forty years since Dr. Thomas Condon, Oregon State Geologist, first discovered traces of great mammals in the Pacific Northwest. Here had been magnificent feeding and breeding grounds and great elephant wallows in an age when the climate was suited to these animals.

The largest tusk found in the northwest is a six-foot section, ten inches thick, taken from the bed of Myrtle Creek on the Charles R. James farm in Douglas County, August 17, 1927. It was found in 1926 by a girl which fishing, who, mistaking it for a huge snag, did not report the find for some time. It is believed to be one of the three largest fossil tusks known--a tusk of that size having been discovered in Florida and another in India.

Not uncommonly are elephant and mastodon fossils displayed in Willamette Valley store windows, whither they have been brought from gravel beds, moraines, marshes and streams.

These, with other evidence, indicate that the region west of the Cascade Range was at one time a zoological garden where elephants and mastodons--the first plowmen of the Oregon countryused their great tusks in upturning roots for food. Those were the days of the elephant-and-palm climate when huge animals, now extinct, existed here in great numbers.

Many of them lived in the highlands of Oregon, where the cold is now so severe that tropical animals could not exist. Yet, elephants and mastodons were, apparently, more numerous there than in the lowlands, where the climate is tempered by the warm winds of the Japan current. There great beasts, however, may have lived in the Oregon country before the Japan current came to temper the climate.

Homer, John B. 1928. Hunting Elephants in Oregon. In: Days and Deeds in the Oregon Country, pp. 9-14. J.K. Gill Company, Portland, Oregon.

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