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Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is now available.

Some of Jack Nisbet's "Boundary" columns are available here, with more on the way.

Mammoth Time
December 2004

During December's long cold nights, the stories people tell have a way of drifting back to a time when the land that was even darker and more frigid. The wind always blew then; great walls of ice loomed to the north; animals of great size roamed the valleys. This spectral setting, magnetically attractive to listeners of all ages, was a reality in the same Columbia River drainage where we live today. The scattered puzzle pieces left behind provide only fragments of a plot line, and often raise just as many questions as they answer.

In 1920, magnesite quarry workers in the Huckleberry Mountains west of Chewelah unearthed a tooth about the size of a human foot. Paleontologists identified it as the right upper third molar of a Columbia mammoth, and it was acquired by the Eastern Washington Historical Society in Spokane. When the society's new Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture opened a couple of years ago, the tooth was on display in the “"Small Town"s” exhibit for all to see.

Illustration by Emily Nisbet

Viewed from the top, the molar displays the mammoth's characteristic narrow ivory ridge looping back and forth across the biting surface in a graceful filigree. Viewed from the side, it is obvious that the loops are formed by parallel plates of enamel, with thin layers of dentine sandwiched between. The number of enamel ridges, combined with the size and wear on the tooth, provides a rough index for the age of the mammoth that left it behind. The Chewelah tooth showed 16 plates, indicating that about 8 had been worn away by the front-to-back chewing sequence of the mammoth jaw. That means that a mature adult mammoth was wandering the Huckleberry Range, a magnificent beast that might have stood 13 feet at the shoulder and weighed 10 tons, sweeping the ground with a pair of lyre-shaped tusks that measured 12 feet along the curve.

So what does a single tooth mean in relation to the environment of an entire region? It takes a whole range of scientific disciplines to reassemble the tale, and there will always be disagreements and adjustments in interpretation. But the current version of the story runs something like this:

About two million years ago, changes in the global climate precipitated a long Ice Age that altered the landscape, vegetation, and wildlife of North America. Geologists call it the Pleistocene and mark its end as recently as 10,000 years before the present. The Pleistocene Era did not take the form of a single frozen event, but rather long cycles of variable temperature; during the entire epoch, glaciers in the northern hemisphere advanced and retreated like the spread of a vast amoeba. In extended periods when summer heat did not melt off the accumulation of winter snow, ice piled up to thicknesses measured in thousands of feet. The great weight of these masses deformed the crust of the whole continent, and frozen sea water sometimes lowered the level of the ocean by more than 350 feet, exposing a whole new province known as Berengia.

Plants and animals worked their way across this land bridge in both directions –- over generations of time horses and camel family members headed west to Asia, while mammoths moved east into our world perhaps a million and a half years ago. The last great glacial advance included a finger of ice that stretched south through the Colville Valley until something like 15 to 20,000 years ago. Mammoths remained on the scene here for some millennia after that, but were probably extinct in our area around 10,000 years before the present.

Humans arrived on the scene at some point after the glaciers retreated. A cache of Clovis tools unearthed in East Wenatchee might be over 10,000 years old, and Kennewick Man has been determined to have lived at the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia Rivers around 9,200 years ago. But the overlap between human and mammoth occupation of the Columbia drainage would have been a blink of the eye compared to the long run of elephants in our region, and the evidence of human interaction with mammoths in the Inland Northwest is sketchy and controversial.

While the 1920 Chewelah mammoth molar tells us a little about the animal, its location raises more questions than it answers. All other eastern Washington mammoth remains have been found in lower latitudes, south of the margin of the last great glacial lobes, but geologists are certain that the Colville Valley was ice-bound during the last period of glaciation. The Chewelah mammoth may have fed on green open hillsides in between periods of glacial advance, and died long, long ago. Or it may have found a nunatak, an island of ice-free vegetation that provided the bunchgrass, flowering herbs, shrubs, and tree growth that satisfied the elephants' diet, an ecosystem that botanists today call “"mammoth steppe."

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Recent advances in chemistry and technology have opened up some exciting options for dating remains of Ice Age mammals, but it will take new fossil finds to add more detail to the larger story. In the meantime, it is possible to enjoy Keith Powell and David Govedere's wonderful mammoth mural on the wall of the Chewelah City Hall, to examine the subtle mix of shrubs and grasses that might have spread across the valley floor, as long as we understand it remains a long shot that humans, ice, and elephants shared the Colville Valley for more than a brief moment in time.

For readers interested in feeling even colder this winter, however, there are a wealth of new and old books out there to fan the flame of curiosity. Mammoths, by Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn (Boxtree Press, 1994) is the best illustrated guide to the beast for the general reader.

Mammoths, Mastodons, and Elephants, by Gary Haynes (Cambridge University Press, 1991) takes a more technical bent, and offers fascinating comparisons between the life history of Columbia mammoths and African elephants.

Bjorn Kurten was a Swedish paleontologist who conveyed the magic of past time both in scholarly books such as Ice Age and Pleistocene Mammals of North America and in romanticized but scientifically accurate novels such as Singletusk and Dance of the Tiger.

After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America, by E.C. Pielou, (University of Chicago Press, 1991) evokes a vision of how the landscape slowly evolved into what we see now.

Two recent books that tackle the confused state of our archaeology are
The Early Settlement of North America: The Clovis Era by Gary Haynes (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and The Settlement of the Americas: A new Prehistory, by Tom D. Dillehay (Basic Books, 2003).

Reprints of Jack Nisbet's "Boundary" columns are available here.

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