Winchell’s Megatherium

Winchell’s Megatherium

‘..one of the most wonderful monsters which Nature ever fashioned.’   1875 Star Tribune

Don Juan to the Devil: You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings. Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the lives of a thousand soldiers.                                  – Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw - 1903

When Shaw wrote Man and Superman, dinosaurs had not yet completed their conquest of large mammals in the public perception. Although the 1880’s Bone Rush eventually propelled dinosaurs to the peak of past paleontological wonders, during the prior century, immense mammals held the stage. Mammoths and mastodons captured the imagination of scientists and school children alike, but those past pachyderms had a compatriot equal to their fame. Megatherium americanum, whose name literally means ‘great American beast’ was the largest of the giant ground sloths of Pliocene and Pleistocene time and its bulk nearly rivaled that of the contemporary mammoths and mastodons.

Part of its fame was because Megatherium was among the first prehistoric animals formally named (in 1796) and their existence helped George Cuvier prove his concept of extinction. However, in the United States, their widespread public recognition and innumerable references in literature and the press was directly due to life-size casts of a Megatherium skeleton. Those casts were produced and sold by Henry Augustus Ward of Rochester, New York, who had built a business furnishing scientific materials for museums and schools. 

Greg McDonald, a paleontologist whose work focuses on ground sloths, compiled a list of thirty-four North American museums that purchased Ward’s Megatherium cast. The casts ended up in institutions that ranged from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast and from Canada to the Gulf. 

Mammals, including the Megatherium, not only dominated the public’s knowledge of fossils but Ward’s collection as well. Ward’s only dinosaur-related casts were six casts of Iguanodon bones and two miniature figurines of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ sculptures from the grounds of south London’s Crystal Palace Park. You could purchase all of Ward’s dinosaurian casts for only $45.50 compared to the megathere cast’s price tag of $250. Yet, the dinosaur casts’ visual impact did not begin to approach a fifth of the Megatherium cast’s majesty.

One of Ward’s Megatherium casts was purchased by the University of Minnesota in 1875 and installed in the university’s General Museum in Old Main. An installation that proved far easier in theory than in practice…

Although any errors in this post are entirely the author’s, several people provided information concerning Winchell’s Megatherium or the Megatherium casts in general. Matt Edling, the Lab and Collections Manager for the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota, brought Winchell’s correspondence to Ward to my attention. Those letters are posted at The Ward Project. Rebecca Toov, Collections Archivist at the University of Minnesota’s University Archives, compiled a huge reference base of references to Winchell’s Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota and his General Museum, which includes many Ariel articles on the Megatherium. Grace DeVault, Paleontology Collections Assistant at the Science Museum of Minnesota, was instrumental in tracking the Megatherium’s subsequent history at that institution.

Ward and two experienced assistants spent nearly two months assembling their skeleton. They then promptly started offering additional casts to other institutions, publicizing the skeleton in a 34-page illustrated pamphlet on the Megatherium, which also mentioned a Glyptodon cast. 

The locusts arrived in 1874. Trillions of locusts made up immense swarms initially mistaken for dust storms or snowstorms, but storms would have left less damage in their wake. Over two million square miles from the Great Plains into Canada were affected and combined with the economic depression triggered by the 1873 Panic, the locusts posed an existential threat to the state of Minnesota. Thousands of farm families were financially harmed or ruined, including the Ingalls family in southwestern Minnesota whose struggles with the locusts were the background of Laura Ingalls Widler’s ‘On the Banks of Plum Creek.’ 

The plague also forced Winchell’s survey to take its first serious steps towards natural history rather than geology. In 1876, Allen Whitman joined Winchell’s survey to study the locusts, the survey’s first biological investigation which placed the survey on a path that would culminate in the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History, the precursor to our modern Bell Museum.

Having threatened Winchell’s acquisition of his Megatherium in 1875; and successfully diverted the trajectory of his survey in 1876; the Rocky Mountain locusts took a farewell tour of the state in 1877 and then disappeared from Minnesota never to return. 

More germane to our current story, on the back of his letter, scrawled across the page from top to bottom in a larger hand, Winchell wrote Ward a desperate postscript: ‘Please send full directions for Mounting the Megatherium.’

Although Ward offered the services of two experienced men to mount the Megatherium for customers, the cost for that service was more than for the mount itself. Winchell would have had to raise another $350 to cover the work, not including the railroad fare for the men. He lacked the funds and there was no way he could come up with enough Minnesota fossils and skins to cover that amount in trade. His university could not even afford $45 to purchase the necessary irons for the mounts but had to rely on Ward’s gratis drawings of those irons. Consequently, having purchased the Megatherium, Winchell would have to mount it himself. 

An April 11, 1876, letter from Winchell did not mention the Megatherium but noted that twenty-two of the casts had been sent without labels and more importantly, the jaw of the Megatherium’s glyptodon companion was broken. Winchell denigrated Ward’s assistant’s pathetic attempts to fix the jaw and purchased two dollars’ worth of plaster, paint, and brushes to undertake the repairs himself. Apparently, Winchell’s efforts were successful as the glyptodon’s jaw currently shows no signs of injury.

Winchell’s unhappiness with the casts’ damage may have been magnified because of the way Ward’s staff had mounted animals that Winchell had collected on the 1874 Black Hills Expedition along with a northern Minnesota moose. In the same letter, Winchell listed a litany of mounting errors, from the grizzly bear having loose claws to misshaped elk. However,  his most plaintive complaint may be that the badger looked like a lynx. Which makes me deeply regret that we have no photographs of those mounts. 

Undoubtedly, Winchell’s myriad other tasks diverted him from mounting the Megatherium but his struggles with the cast stretched out a remarkably long time and were the subject of several stories in the Ariel, the university’s first student publication. That is all the more remarkable as the Ariel did not debut until December of 1877, when Winchell’s battle with the mount was already two years old. During the previous summer, Winchell had made an aborted attempt on the Megatherium but had to abandon it for field work. 

Four years after beginning his assault on the Megatherium’s mounting, Winchell had the lower half of the beast precariously and picturesquely suspended by twine and already knew he was clueless about the position of another bone apart from a guess it was some part of the upper torso. 

In the meantime, the December 20, 1878, Ariel noted ‘The museum is still closed and the Megatherium is master of the field.’

A few pages before that terse assessment, the same Ariel carried a picturesque, possibly fictional, description of a visitor’s museum experience that can be found here. Although that description did not include the Megatherium, its glyptodon companion was briefly mentioned. 

For the record, Winchell was not kidding when he told Ward he had the Megatherium’s legs held up by twine. Winchell was meticulous about the survey’s financial records and the survey’s ledger entry for March 11, 1879, was indeed a purchase of forty-five cents worth of twine for the ‘Meg.’ However, Winchell did not just rely on twine. Ten cents of annealed wire was purchased on December 20, 1878, with another ten cents worth on January 24, 1879. Along with four bolts for a quarter on March 3 and three dozen screws on March 7 for a nickel. 

Among the Winchell family papers in the Minnesota Historical Society’s collections is an 1884 handwritten ‘Sketch of N. H. Winchell’ that references the Megatherium struggle.

‘At another time a set of Wards casts were purchased among which was the Megatherium which he mounted and placed in position unassisted – a thing which few curators in the country would have thought of attempting.’

Despite that family memory, Winchell did not make his final assault on the Megatherium completely unassisted. Among the megathere-related purchases in the survey’s financial ledger are three records of payments to individuals for work in the museum that were most likely or were definitely tied to the Megatherium. 

In November and December of 1878, Winchell paid a total of $16.10 to ‘Syffert’. The only Syffert in the 1878 Minneapolis City Directory was Charles Syffert, a university student. Unlike others on the survey accounts, Syffert was simply a student with no known expertise or background for the survey’s scientific work. Hence, he was most likely simply helping Winchell with the physical task of constructing the Megatherium. However, Syffert never graduated from the University of Minnesota nor did he see the Megatherium fully mounted. On February 5, 1879, Charles Syffert was judged to be insane and committed to the state asylum in Saint Peter. Although he survived the fire that destroyed the facility’s north wing the following year, Syffert’s final fate is unknown.

The other helper’s story had a happier ending, as Winchell’s fourteen-year-old son ‘Hortie’ was paid a dime for his work on the Megatherium on February 25^th. Hortie (Horace Vaughn Winchell) would not only see the completed Megatherium in its glory but went on to help his father with numerous projects and become a successful geologist in his own right. 

Finally, on March 27, 1879, four years after the cast’s purchase, the Ariel finally announced the finished mount’s debut. Although even then, the article jested that Winchell’s efforts may not have been entirely complete. 

The skeleton of the Megatherium is finely mounted, and towers to the ceiling of the museum. There are a few bones left which the Professor will hang on wherever there appears to be a good chance, or where symmetry required it. Failing in this he proposed to put them together and make a Glyptodon, though he says he has got a Glyptodon and he don't know but what he had better make an Ornithorynchus. At least he'll make something and now [sic] allow any bones to be wasted.

However, it would not be the last time Winchell’s Megatherium graced the Ariel’s pages. Two and a half years later, on November 3, 1881, it was playing the unlikely role of Cupid. 

The museum is usually well supplied with specimens of the genus homo who commune together in loving pairs under the shade of the Megatherium Cuvieri, or in some snug corner, and are sometimes looked upon as curiousities [sic] by scientific visitors. As one of the Profs. remarked, they are little deer (dears).

In 1889, Winchell’s General Museum moved into new quarters in the west wing of the newly constructed Science Hall, quickly renamed Pillsbury Hall after the man who donated the funds for its construction. In Pillsbury Hall, the Megatherium was finally photographed. 

Only four photographs of the General Museum’s Megatherium are known. The best known two were originally reproduced in the 1894 and 1897 Gopher yearbooks. The 1894 image was taken from the museum southeast corner and shows the Megatherium rising almost to the museum’s fifteen-foot-tall ceiling. Its companion Glyptodon stands behind the Megatherium. The 1897 photograph was taken from the museum’s opposite corner near its front door. The latter photograph shows the Megatherium’s three-dollar tree more clearly. The 1894 Gopher photograph was also published the previous year in a Souvenir Manual of the Minnesota Educational Exhibit for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, 1893.

Other photographs of the Megatherium undoubtedly have been lost with time, including what might have been the first photograph. On January 23, 1886, Winchell wrote a brief note to Ward, referencing a request from Ward for photos of the Megatherium. Winchell promised to try to find out about the negative, but said the original photograph was in the educational department and that he had nothing to do with getting or exhibiting the picture.

Winchell would subsequently send Ward a January 28^th letter from William Wirt Pendergast of the State of Minnesota’s Department of Public Instruction that said the photographs that had been on exhibit in New Orleans had been returned to the University of Minnesota. That New Orleans exhibit was undoubtedly the 1884 World Cotton Centennial. 

However, in a February 1^st annotation, Winchell wrote Ward that the pictures were not to be found at the University and provided the artist’s name as George Jacoby, of 252 Nicollet Ave. Winchell undoubtedly meant to say the photographer was William H. Jacoby or his son, Charles L. Jacoby of Jacoby W. H. and Son, photographers located at 250-252 Nicollet Avenue. His use of George may have been a Freudian slip, indicative of the stress the Megatherium caused him, as George Jacoby owned a campus area wholesale liquor store. Winchell’s wife Charlotte was a noted temperance advocate though, so it is unlikely the Megatherium drove Winchell to drink. However, the missing photograph may have been a foreshadow of the Megatherium’s own fate.

For nearly eight decades, Winchell’s Megatherium was the centerpiece of the General Museum and its descendant Geology Museum. However, the department’s growth and lack of support for the museum eventually ended its reign there and started the Megatherium on the last stages of its journey. A journey that currently ends in mystery.

By the 1950’s the Geology Museum’s fate was sadly predictable. With limited finances and greatly increased space needs, the Geology department’s support for the museum faded. When the Bell Museum announced a planned expansion, the Geology department leapt at the chance to offload the Geology Museum’s exhibits and free up the museum’s space in Pillsbury Hall. When that expansion fell through, the die had already been cast, so the museum’s collections were stored or discarded while its exhibits were broken down and many of them were given to the Saint Paul Institute of Science and Letters (which later became the Science Museum of Minnesota). 

Before exploring that twist in the tale though, we should take a moment to note how the Megatherium’s companion fared at the Science Museum of Minnesota. 

Winchell’s Glyptodon cast stayed with the Saint Paul Institute and is still on display in the Paleontology Hall of the present Science Museum of Minnesota. However, despite many family visits to that hall, I never noticed the Glyptodon’s carapace was mounted backwards. In retrospect, the error is obvious as the aperture widths for the neck and tail greatly differ. Yet the power of a display is remarkable and although I had often wondered why such a heavily armored creature would retain a vulnerable neck, I never considered the carapace might be reversed!

In fairness to Winchell, the 1894 photograph of his General Museum shows Winchell mounted the Glyptodon cast correctly. Its carapace was apparently turned about when it was mounted at the Saint Paul Institute. 

The Concordia College Conspiracy

Any comments, concerns, or suggestions?

email: Kent Kirkby ([email protected])