One Township's Yesterdays Chapter III  

GIGANTIC CREATURES OF ANCIENT TIMES

"Monster fishes swam the silent main, Stately forests waved. their giant branches, Mountains hurled their snowy avalanches, Mammoth creatures stalked across the plain; Nature revelled in grand mysteries." .... Anonymous

WILD LIFE in the region now called Union Township, as elsewhere over a vast area of this ever-changing earth of ours, was to a large degree destroyed by the glacier. Some of the creatures existing prior to the Glacial Age, being fleet of foot, migrated southward ahead of °the advancing ice; others, the tardy ones, sluggish by nature and perhaps lacking in decision, were caught and overwhelmed.

After the great glacier had melted, the deluge resulting subsided at length. The flowing away of vast quantities of water left a land covered with drift material, furrowed into stream-beds, dotted with lakes and ponds, and much of it in the form of morass. The climate moderated. Aided by the winds and waters, sun and rain, vegetation got a fresh start. And wild life began anew, the kind we know today, birds, beasts, fishes, reptiles, insects, and several strange. creatures that we do not actually know today, but know of, having heard something about them or even seen some of their remains.

After aquatic life had progressed sufficiently, no doubt there appeared first the fresh-water birds: cranes, geese, swans, ducks, plovers and the like, in the shallows and on the borders of the lakes and marshes. In the course of time;' on the firmer and somewhat drier land strode huge creatures, cousins of the circus elephant of today and known to us as the mammoth and the mastodon. The former was a hairy sort of elephant creature, the latter an old timer of the same family, as old as the hills, it might truthfully be said. Both are extinct now, their peculiar race no more. They are called prehistoric curiosities, for they have been gone probably a thousand years, perhaps many thousand; no one seems to be quite certain.

There were other singular creatures, antiques in tile animal line, in Indiana in the days of yore. Some, if not all of them, stalked across the plain or browsed on the Saginaw Moraine here abouts, never dreaming or carin [caring] about the future affairs of Unio [Union]Township. They had troubles o their own, it seems, and finall [finally] gave up the battle for existence One of them, at least, had ver [very] little dreaming or caring ability In fact, its mind may have bee quite a blank, for it was a hug sloth, portly of build but. puny o brain, The creature was as large as a cow. And if it had an thinking power at all, it probably figured, in a hazy sort of way "Better a thousand years of bliss and ignorance than a cycle o man's sway." It is evident that the sloth did not wait for the coming of man to these parts.

Wild Horses.

Also, two species of wild horse roamed Indiana in those queer days. And there was a peccary o wild hog, but this was not so u usual. Some hogs run wild today they are not the peccary kind however. Still another oddity those ancient times was a strange beaver like beast as large as black bear, whose bones have been found at widely separate spots in this State, 'the far southern tip, a bit below Logansport, and also east of Union Town ship, just over in Kosciusko County. It is possible that som [some] day someone will gather an arm ful [full] of this animal's bones some where in Union Township. Worse things than that have happened.

Big and strong as these animals were, they all died off, and other creatures, smaller and in sense weaker, survived. Could it have been a case of the survival of the fittest? The smaller animals may have been craftier, more agile and energetic, and perhaps better fitted to outwit their enemies. But who knows? It is mystery.

The race of the giants of the animal world must have been dying one. The finding of skeletons of the mastodon in low, marshy locations has given rise to the supposition that the monster met death by miring in the bogs. Another opinion is that man helped to exterminate them. Some writers have expressed the belief that the first man probably invaded this region before the mammoth and mastodon became extinct, and, "curiously enough, says MAURICE THOMPSON, "the fact appears that rude spearheads an arrow points have been found in the earth covering the skeleton of these monsters; but to one acquainted with the range an effect of such weapons (and surely THOMPSON was), it seem scarcely possible and not at all probable that elephants could have been killed with them."

Another writer expressed the belief that the mastodon may indeed have been hunted down by the Indians, though there is no record or memory of the fact The mastodon, a near relative of the elephant, developed early and died out in Europe before the Ice Age, but continued to roam about North America till comparatively recent times. "It may have been contemporary of early man at the end of the glacial period in North America," according to the reasoning of GEOFFERY PARSONS.

Find Relies.

The elephant developed from a small pig-like animal the size of a pony, and its ancestry has been traced by genealogists concerned in the family trees of zoological tribes, from an origin in Egypt. Before the Ice Age, these elephantine creatures reached their greatest proportions, slightly larger than the largest elephants known today, From Africa they spread to Europe, into Asia, thence to America. So it came to pass that the mastodon Americanus became a very early settler of the Union Township region and evidently passed his last days hereabouts. Comparative few remains of the mastodon have been dug up in these parts. In June, 1874, OSCAR L. BLAND found some relics in a pool in Deep Creek on the farm of his father, ALEXANDER BLAND, in the northeast corner of Walnut Township, not far from Bourbon. Some large teeth were unearthed, also other parts of a skeleton, including a well preserved tusk about nine feet long. One big tooth weighed when found, with the debris attached to it, about eight pounds. Later when cleaned, it was lighter, weighing around six pounds.

A much more recent find of mastodon bones occurred in late September, 1929, not far from the location of the mastodon of 1844. A ditch dredging crew were at work about a mile from Walnut, Marshall County, in low flat ground on a farm, when their caterpillar dredge scooped up the first of the bones. The scoop threw out a large jawbone with teeth still in it. The next scoop ful [full] came up with a huge skull and other bones, which were at a depth of from seven to eight feet. The rest of the bones recovered were carefully unearthed. There were some mere fragments, but the skull and perhaps nearly half of the original skeleton were a brought forth in a fair state of preservation. Included in the find were two tusks about six feet long and a smaller short one, several ribs and vertebrae, a femur, two or more tibia, a large section of a scapula (shoulder blade), and many tarsals [tarsal] and other small bones.

This find caused considerable a excitement. Representatives of Field Museum, Chicago, were soon on the scene of the discovery and saw that the bones were those of a female mastodon, about sixty-five years old, the back teeth having four cusps. At about one hundred years a fifth ridge appears on the crown of the teeth. The small tusk found with the others was thought to be that of a baby mastodon. The great skull measured about forty-two inches long by twenty-two inches wide. Museum officials estimated the age of the skeleton was between 25,000 and 100,000 years. The bones were taken to Chicago, where they were assembled and installed in Field _ s Museum.