Hunting the history of the Channel Islands mammoths

My visit to Santa Rosa Island back in June was just part of a larger project on Channel Islands National Park, for which I've been gathering information, researching, and writing for a number of months. Part of that work is summarizing the history of paleontological investigations, which go back well into the 19th century, and one of the most important parts of that is the history of mammoth finds on the islands. As often happens the story turned out to involve many more parts than I thought.

We don't know when people started noticing mammoth fossils in the Channel Islands of southern California (or for that matter if they were there before the mammoths became fossils; there's a decent chance there was some overlap). They certainly *did* notice them, though: Orr (1968) and Cushing et al. (1984) discussed a find of two mammoth teeth in a burial site on Santa Cruz Island, although as Cushing et al. noted, the various pre-contact peoples seem to have generally left the fossils alone. In terms of a scientific context, the first report I can find is from 1873, but it isn't Stearns (1873) as frequently cited. Instead, in April 1873, a note in the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences included the information that the Academy had acquired an "Elephas" tooth from "Santa Barbara Island" [=Santa Rosa Island] collected by W. G. Blunt. A few months later, Robert E. C. Stearns submitted the following to the September 1, 1873 meeting of the Academy:

"Mr. Stearns called attention to the fossil Tooth of a species of Elephant from Santa Rosa Island, presented some time ago by Mr. W. G. Blunt, as it proved that the island was formerly a portion of the main land. He had been informed by Mr. Blunt, that the tooth had been found in situ, and near it was embedded the tusk of an elephant; the latter so far decomposed that it crumbled, in the attempt to get it out."

I can find no record of the tooth in the collections of the Academy; it's possible the specimen is hiding somewhere, maybe misidentified, but it's more likely the tooth was lost along with just about everything else in the collections in the fire following the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

Many modern references place the discovery of the tooth in the 1850s. Roth (1996) reported the early 1850s, while Agenbroad and Morris (1999) attributed it to a U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey expedition in 1856. While there was such a survey in 1856, and there certainly was a George William Blunt working for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in that time frame, the "W. G. Blunt" involved told another party (Charles D. Voy, who we'll be getting to) that he collected it in 1871 (Voy 1890–1893). In 1871, George William Blunt would have been almost 70 years old, which does not preclude his having been the man involved. However, his death in 1878 would seem to pose a formidable obstacle to his being the W. G. Blunt who worked with Voy on the Channel Islands in 1890. I suspect that the similar initials have led authors to confuse the more famous George W. Blunt with W. G. Blunt, although I must confess that I have no idea who W. G. Blunt could be; maybe a younger relative? A W. G. Blunt was working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1880s, and published a report on Choctaw Bend Reach; maybe it's him? There was also a William G. Blunt in San Francisco who was a contributor to the Academy in this time frame. Similarly, although the Survey was on the islands in the 1856, it was also working there in the early 1870s, when W. G. Blunt was working for it, so it is not necessary to tie the collection to 1856.

No images are known to exist of Blunt's tooth. The honor of the first photographed specimens of pygmy mammoth fossils goes to Voy, but in a roundabout way. Charles D. Voy was one of that class of 19th century naturalists-slash-collectors who did a little bit of everything. In the early 1890s he began preparing his observations on San Miguel Island and Santa Rosa Island for publication by the California State Mining Bureau. Unfortunately for Voy, his two manuscripts were in the hopper when the governor of California (Henry Markham) issued a message to the various offices calling for shorter, less expensive publications. The State Mining Bureau being one of the chief offenders, several upcoming reports which were deemed to be outside of the mission of the bureau were cut, Voy's among them (Yale 1893). Yale's report of contrition for previous excesses includes thumbnail descriptions of the lost reports, from which we learn that Voy's report on San Miguel Island was to have been 34 pages long with 11 full-page plates, and the Santa Rosa Island report was to have been 48 pages long with 5 plates, including information on mammoths.

I first ran across the story of the lost Voy publications while reading through Johnson (1967); the editor Mary R. Hill ran a brief item directly after Johnson's paper describing them and lamenting their loss. Shortly thereafter, while going through a later publication of Johnson's (Johnson 1978), I was surprised to encounter Voy's San Miguel Island manuscript cited in the bibliography. The citation stated that the manuscript was in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Figuring it was worth a shot, I poked around the electronic listings and found that both manuscripts were included in the Lorenzo Gordin Yates collection. It was a bit odd, but the two knew each other (coincidentally Yates was also a victim of the publication purge).

The manuscript scans I received from the library were not exactly the same as Yale's description. Significantly, when Voy wrote them he was calling for 32 plates between the two, which may have given Governor Markham fits had they gone through. Either he thought better of it, or someone recommended he show some economy, because the text shows strike-throughs for the text associated with many plates, reducing the number to what Yale cited. The five planned figures for Santa Rosa Island were intact, complete with hand-corrected captions updating their numbers, but the eleven intended for the revised San Miguel Island manuscript were missing. It is known that they existed, though, because Yale (1893) reported that the plates had already been prepared, and because they show up later on. The text was hand-written, so to make it easier to read and search I made a transcription. (Some of the charm of working with these forgotten manuscripts was lessened by Voy's inordinate fondness for run-on sentences, but I suppose that's what editors are for.)

Voy spent a considerable part of the Santa Rosa Island manuscript, about three pages, discussing his mammoth finds. He attributed them to "Elephas primigenius" (which some of you may recognize as the species name of the woolly mammoth), but also suggested that at least three species were present. How he arrived at that conclusion is not stated. Although mammoth fossils were abundant, he had a hard time collecting them because they generally crumbled during extraction. He and Blunt did manage to secure a large partial skull with teeth and tusks, and a seemingly associated group of bones (humerus nearly 20 inches long [51 cm], tibia, and partial tusk) of a smaller animal, on October 27, 1890.

Voy's manuscript also included the information that his specimens were given to the "Museum of the State Mining Bureau". Sure enough, the California State Mining Bureau's 1899 catalog included five catalog numbers for specimens collected on Santa Rosa Island, October 27, 1890, that match what Voy reported: 12288, a partial upper jaw, teeth, and tusks of "Elephas primigenius"; 12289, a tooth and partial lower jaw of a "young" individual; 12290, a tusk of a "young" individual; 12292, a humerus; and 12292, a probable tibia of a "young" individual. We can guess that "young" individuals are more likely pygmy mammoths. I checked with the California State Mining and Mineral Museum to see if the specimens were still extant, but was informed that the museum had sent its fossils to the California Academy of Sciences several decades ago (Darci Moore, CSM&MM curator, pers. comm.). Following up with the CAS, my curiosity was rewarded with the information that at least three of those specimens could be located (12289, 12292, and 12290 or 12291; Christine Garcia, CAS collections manager of geology, and Maricela Abarca, curatorial assistant, pers. comm.).

By this time I thought I'd turned up everything I could about Voy's mammoths, but it turned out there was one more loose end. I already mentioned that I was puzzled by the manuscripts being in the Yates collection at the Bancroft Library. Had Voy given them to him for reference or review? Had Yates requested them for his own work? Was there a later unsuccessful effort at publication? Whatever the exact circumstances, Yates certainly got some use out of them. Specifically, he published 11 of the 16 intended plates within a series of short publications on "Prehistoric California" in the Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences (Yates 1902–1905). (This was after trying and failing to publish the whole as a book [Camp 1963]; the work on San Miguel and Santa Rosa seems to have been cursed.) Among the plates was one instantly recognizable as the mammoth plate from Voy's unpublished manuscript. Yates briefly described Voy's finds in the section published in volume 2(8), and accidentally promised the plate as Plate 10, but he'd just used Plate 10 for a different mammoth, so it had to wait for the next issue. (Yates called the species "Elephas americanus", presumably DeKay [1842]'s species which is now sunk into Mammuthus primigenius rather than borrowing the American mastodon, Mammut americanum; corrected 2019/11/29.) And so, after all of that, the plate I first thought was lost, then not lost but unpublished, turned out to have been published off-handedly a decade after it was supposed to have been used.

And here it is, the earliest known published image of mammoth fossils from Santa Rosa Island (M. exilis possibly being everything but the partial skull, which could be M. columbi), repurposed for Yates (1902–1905). Voy's original caption was to have been "Fossil mammoth (E. primigenius) found Oct 27, 1890, on the N. W. side of Santa Rosa Island, Cal."

References

Agenbroad, L. D., and D. P. Morris. 1999. Giant island/pygmy mammoths: the late Pleistocene prehistory of Channel Islands National Park. Pages 27–31 in V. L. Santucci and L. McClelland, editors. National Park Service Paleontological Research, Technical Report NPS/NRGRD/GRDTR-99/03. National Park Service, Geologic Resources Division, Lakewood, Colorado.

California Academy of Sciences. 1873. [Minutes for regular meeting, April 21, 1873.] Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 5:71.

California State Mining Bureau. 1899. Catalogue of the State Museum of California, Vol. 5, being the collections made by the State Mining Bureau, from September 1, 1890, to March 30, 1897. A. J. Johnston, Supt. State Printing, Sacramento, California.

Camp, C. L. 1963. Lorenzo Gordin Yates (1837–1909) (with a portrait). Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 4(3):178–193.

Cushing, J., M. Daily, E. Noble, V. L. Roth, and A. Wenner. 1984. Fossil mammoths from Santa Cruz Island, California. Quaternary Research 21(3):376–384.

Dall, W. H., and G. D. Harris. 1892. Correlation papers: Neocene. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. Bulletin 84.

DeKay, J. E. 1842. Natural history of New York. Zoology, part 1, Mammalia. Appleton and Wiley & Putnam, New York, New York.

Johnson, D. L. 1967. Caliche on the Channel Islands. California Division of Mines and Geology Mineral Information Service 20:151–158.

Johnson, D. L. 1978. The origin of island mammoths and the Quaternary land bridge history of the northern Channel Islands, California. Quaternary Research 10(2):204–225.

Orr, P. C. 1968. Prehistory of Santa Rosa Island. Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara, California.

Roth, V. L. 1996. Pleistocene dwarf elephants from the California Islands. Pages 249–253 in J. H. Shoshani and P. Tassy, editors. The Proboscidea. University of Oxford Press, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Stearns, R. E. C. 1873. [no title: paraphrase of comments in minutes of Academy’s regular meeting, Monday, September 1st, 1873]. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 5:152.

Stock, C., and E. L. Furlong. 1928. The Pleistocene elephants of Santa Rosa Island, California. Science 68(1754):140–141.

Voy, C. D. 1890–1893. Santa Rosa Island (unpublished MS). Lorenzo Gordin Yates Papers, BANC MSS C-B 472, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Yale, C. G. 1893. Editor’s report to Board of Examiners. Pages 3–7 in Eleventh report of the state mineralogist, two years ending September 15, 1892. California State Mining Bureau, Sacramento, California.

Yates, L. G. 1902–1905. Prehistoric California. Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences 1(7):81–86, 1(8):97–100, 1(9):113–118, 1(10):129–137, 1903 2(1):145–155, 2(2):17–22, 2(4):44–51, 2(6):74, 2(7):87–89, 2(8):97–101, 2(9):113–118, 1904 3(1):6–10, 3(9):153–158, 4(1):16–17, 4(2):26–27.