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By Root 1528 0

’s Express at Angels. Mr. Scribner’s clerk, Mr. Matthews, cleaned off part of the incrustations covering most of the fossil. Upon recognizing that it was part of a human skull, he sent it to Dr. Jones, who lived in the nearby village of Murphy’s and was an enthusiastic collector of such items. Then Dr. Jones wrote to the office of the Geological Survey in San Francisco, and after receiving a reply, he forwarded the skull to this office, where it was examined by Whitney. Whitney at once made the journey to Murphy’s and Angels, where he personally questioned Mr. Mattison, who confirmed the report that was given by Dr. Jones. Both Scribner and Jones were personally known to Whitney and were regarded by him as trustworthy.

On July 16, 1866, Whitney presented to the California Academy of Sciences a report on the Calaveras skull, affirming that it was found in Pliocene strata. The skull caused a great sensation in America.

According to Whitney (1880, p. 270), “The religious press in this country took the matter up . . . and were quite unanimous in declaring the Calaveras skull to be a ‘hoax.’” One paper reported: “We believe the whole story worthy of no scientific credence, and are also more fully established in this belief by the declaration of an able Congregationalist minister, who has preached some time in the region, and who told us that the miners freely told him that they purposely got up the whole affair as a joke on Professor Whitney.” Another religious paper (the Congregationalist, Sept. 27, 1867) reported that the skull “had been placed [in the mine] by some mischievous miners as a hoax upon one of their own number, who was of an anti-Scriptural and geologic turn of mind. He swallowed the hoax and carried the news to Professor Whitney, who thereupon secured the skull for the State Museum” (Whitney 1880, p. 270).

The image of the rough and ready humorists of the rip roaring Gold Rush mining camps having a good joke at the expense of a stuffy geologist is reflected in the following verses excerpted from Bret Harte’s poem “The Pliocene Skull” (Harte 1912, pp. 280–281):

“Speak, O man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil! Primal pioneer of pliocene formation,

Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum

Of volcanic tufa!

“Older than the beasts, the oldest Paleotherium; Older than the trees, the oldest Cryptogami; Older than the hills, those infantile eruptions

Of earth’s epidermis!

“Eo—Mio—Plio—whatsoe’er the ‘cene’ was

That those vacant sockets filled with awe and wonder,—

Whether shores Devonian or Silurian beaches,—

Tell us thy strange story!

“Speak, thou awful vestige of the earth’s creation, Solitary fragment of remains organic!

Tell the wondrous secret of thy past existence,—

Speak! thou oldest primate!”

Even as I gazed, a thrill of the maxilla,

And a lateral movement of the condyloid process, With post-pliocene sounds of healthy mastication, Ground the teeth together.

And from that imperfect dental exhibition, Stained with express juices of the weed nicotine,

Came these hollow accents, blent with softer murmurs

Of expectoration:

“Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted

Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County; But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces Home to old Missouri!”

Whitney noted that the hoax stories did not arise until after his discovery was publicized widely in newspapers. Some of the hoax stories were propagated not by Western poets and preachers but by scientists such as William H. Holmes.

Holmes, an anthropologist, worked for the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846 with a half-million dollar bequest from James Smithson, an English scientist and inventor. As late as the 1890s, the Calaveras skull was still a matter of great interest and debate within the scientific community. Holmes, who tended to doubt the skull’s Tertiary age, wanted to put the matter to rest, once and for all. During a visit to Calaveras County, he gathered testimony from some people who were acquainted with Mr. Scribner and Dr. Jones, and this testimony raised the possibility that the skull