# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/American Elephants

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AMERICAN ELEPHANTS
THIRTY years ago buffalo fed up and down our plains for thousands of miles, the herds sometimes a league across and seven in length. Now these great animals are practically extinct,—slaughtered for the amusement of "sporting" men, who left them to rot on the earth and the Indians to hunger for lack of buffalo meat. Not in like way, nor from mere love of blood, yet even more completely have our elephants been killed. Elephants? Ay, truly. Some of the largest, strongest, most savage of the tribe had their home in this Western world during the age of men. Their skeletons have been found in our marshes, and the separate teeth and bones were a cause of dispute and wonderment among the wise men of recent centuries. Cotton Mather, discoverer of mares'-nests and witches, mentions a thigh-bone seventeen feet long! and Governor Dudley told him that it pertained to a giant "for whom the flood only could prepare a funeral; and without doubt he waded as long as he could keep his head above the clouds, but must at length be confounded, with all other creatures." Afterward it was decided that the bones must have belonged to a colossal lion that ate two or three horses at a meal and roared so when he was hungry that the earth shook. Not until Cuvier's time was it agreed that the monster was a species of elephant, that it was extinct, and that it would have eaten ​neither man nor horses when alive. Old beliefs die hard, all the same, and it is hardly more than fifty years since a Southern "scientist" fixed up the bones of a mastodon in the likeness of a human being, raised it on its hind legs, covered its head with raw hide, and proclaimed it a giant. Another mastodon was grotesquely put together and advertised as the Biblical leviathan, which was supposed to anchor itself to trees by its curved tusks and sleep on the face of the waters. On the Pacific slope the bones of mastodons are found in the gravels, mingled with human bones and stone arrow-heads, showing that men and mastodons lived together, for the elephantine species survived here later than in Europe. In Mexico not only are the bones found, but there are sculptures in which the elephant is represented, and our own Indians portray it in the forms of pipes and in drawings scratched on stone. In Louisiana the red men said that crows had gone to feed on the flesh of an immense animal that had died near the stream they called, because of this incident, Carrion Crow Creek. A mastodon's thigh was exhibited to Cortes as that of a giant, one of a race of evil men whom the Aztecs had succeeded in destroying, after long years of war. In South America similar traditions existed. On the Paraná it was said that the creature burrowed in the bluffs, but in the pampas of the Argentine states it was a Titan again, and "Field of Giants" and "Hill of the Giants" are names that occur there.
​The Delawares had a legend of a wholesale destruction of bear, deer, elk, buffalo, and other animals by the mastodons, which they called "big buffalo;" but before the mischief had gone far the Great Spirit grasped his lightning, stepped out of heaven, the prints of his feet being left on a rock at Big Bone Lick, and killed the monsters right and left. One old bull was tougher than the lightning. As the bolts fell on his forehead he shook them off, and for some time he stood, daring the Great Spirit. At length a stroke fell on his side, and smarting and trumpeting he galloped off toward the northwest, clearing all the rivers and the great lakes in powerful leaps, and there in Alberta, or British Columbia, he still lives, with a few subdued associates. Beside these creatures, the natives say, all other animals are as insects; their skin is proof against arrows, and they have "an arm" that they use as we do ours,—of course, a trunk. Still farther north, in the region of the great, lonely lakes, we hear that the fathers of the Indian tribes had to build their houses on piles in the water, like the ancient dwellings of the Swiss, in order to escape assault from the elephants, who ravaged the whole country.