The Mammoth Bones of the Spokane Prairie
An unusual discovery in Eastern Washington yields prehistoric treasures buried in a shallow strip of prairie.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
W. W. Lee, the well-known engineer, after making a trip through Eastern Washington, recently wrote as follows to the Orange (New Jersey) Courier: 'On my trip through Spokane, I stopped at Latah, and in conversation with Mr. Cuplin of that place regarding the volcanic formation of that section, he informed me that he had obtained some new bones of immense quality. Accompanied by Mr. Cuplin, I went to the spot where the relics were deposited. It is in a low strip of open prairie. The sediment around the spot is twelve or fifteen feet deep and forty or fifty across. The bones were covered by several different strata, but the lower one was intact. Then, following them, layers of ooze. From the spot were taken no less than six elephant, of different sizes, the remains of deer, bison, extinct hart, and giant tar. The dimensions of some of the bones of the giant mammoth were wonderful to look at. The tusks were six feet of dark and polished from the head just below the skull extending downward to the ground, curving up to the tip, which is supposed to have weighed at least 150 pounds. One of the teeth measured 1 foot 9 inches in length and nearly 6 inches in thickness. It weighed 12 pounds. One of the smaller tusks measured eight pounds. The molar teeth measured roughly 12 inches; some of the ribs were four feet long, the pelvis bone six feet across, and an ordinary man could walk inside the carcass.'
“One of the teeth measured 1 foot 9 inches in length and nearly 6 inches in thickness. It weighed 12 pounds... and an ordinary man could walk inside the carcass.”
Amateur paleontological discoveries in the late 19th century helped build the early scientific understanding of Washington's glacial history. Today, Latah remains a quiet agricultural area, but fossil finds continue to occasionally surface in the sedimentary deposits of the Channeled Scablands, reminding us of the massive megafauna that once roamed the Pacific Northwest.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.