Dissertation: Erik D. Anderson

303 Pages·2010·1.49 MB·English

by  Erik Anderson

Feral Bodies, Feral Nature:
Wild Men in America

By Erik D. Anderson

B.A., Grinnell College, 2001

A.M., Brown University, 2004

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of History at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2010
© Copyright 2009 by Erik D. Anderson

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This dissertation by Erik D. Anderson is accepted in its present form
by the Department of History as satisfying the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date__________ __________________________________
Karl Jacoby, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date__________ __________________________________
Elliott Gorn, Reader

Date__________ ___________________________________
Nancy Jacobs, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date__________ ___________________________________
Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

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VITA

Erik D. Anderson was born on June 21, 1979 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He
attended Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where he received a B.A. with honors in
History and Political Science. He received his A.M. from Brown University in 2004. He
has taught courses in U.S. and African history at the University of Rhode Island, Bristol
Community College/University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and Brown University.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the result of the hard work of a great number of people. My
advisor, Karl Jacoby, has been a constant source of advice and encouragement throughout
my graduate career. He has helped me explore the possibilities of this dissertation and
warned me of its many pitfalls. I want to thank Elliott Gorn for his guidance and support.
When I told him I wanted to go ahead with this project, he said that it was the type of
thing he would have done when he was in graduate school—I am still not sure if he
thought that was a good thing. I want to thank Nancy Jacobs for all the encouragement
and insight she has given me while working on this project, but also for introducing me to
a whole new field, mentoring me as a teacher, and being someone I could always talk to
on the way up the stairs. I want to thank all the other teachers and mentors I have had at
Brown: Amy Remensnyder, Deborah Cohen, Mari Jo Buhle, Caroline Karp, and Gordon
Wood. I also want to thank my mentors at Grinnell College: Marci Sortor, Sarah Purcell,
and Pablo Silva.
I also want to say thank you to all the teachers from the Stamford, Connecticut
public schools who saw my potential. It is a testament to their skill and patience as
educators that a learning disabled student such as myself, one whom many believed could
not go to college, could go on to earn a doctorate.
I want to thank the many archivists at institutions great and small who helped me
with my research. In particular, I want to thank the archivists at the University of Texas
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Center for American History; Tennessee State Archives and Library; McMinn County
Historical Society; Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo; the Monroe
County Public Library; the Cincinnati Historical Association; and the Ohio State Library.
This dissertation was made possible by the financial support of Brown University.
A number of colleagues read sections of my dissertation and I want to thank them
for their comments and suggestions: Françoise N. Hamlin and all of the Southern
Historians in New England workshop members; Kenneth Davis and the Texas Culture
Association; and Michelle Kleehammer, Marsha Weisiger, and Kelly Roark from ASEH.
I want to thank my many colleagues in the Brown University Department of
History for their support. Gabriel Rosenberg spent many hours listening and offering
suggestions on this project. This project, and my time at Brown, would have been much
less without him as a colleague and friend. Mark Robbins offered help and guidance on
research, writing, teaching and piscine matters. Finally, I want to thank Gill Frank, not
only for introducing me to the subject of my fifth chapter, but also to my partner.
I want to thank my parents, Lois Anderson and David Anderson, for their support
and love over all these years. Finally, this dissertation could not have been completed
without Allie Hartry. She read every word of this dissertation at least twice and would
make a far better historian than I. More importantly, she has been my love and
companion. She has been my constant source of support and happiness.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
INTRODUCTION. 1

CHAPTER ONE: The Wild People of the Navidad. 16

CHAPTER TWO: The Genealogy the American Wild Man. 59

CHAPTER THREE: The Wild Woman of the Wachita and 92
the Wild Man of Tennessee: Medicine and Environmentalism.

CHAPTER FOUR: Mason Evans/ The Wild Man of the Chilhowee. 124

CHAPTER FIVE: Wild and Queer: Lucy Anne /Joseph Israel Lobdell. 171

CHAPTER SIX: The Evolution the American Wild Man. 189

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Devolution of the Wild Man. 225

CONCLUSION. 259

Bibliography 264
VII
INTRODUCTION.

In March of 1851, two hunters spotted a drove of cattle in a “state of apparent
alarm, evidently pursed by some dread enemy.” The hunters stopped and watched as an
“animal bearing the unmistakable likeness of humanity” appeared behind the cattle,
giving chase. The creature was “of gigantic stature, the body being covered with hair and
the head with long lock which covered his head... his footprints were thirteen inches
long.” Hunters and sportsmen in the region knew him as the Wild Man of Arkansas and
believed him to be “a survivor of the earthquake which desolated that region in 1811.”
Losing his family in the earthquake, the future Wild Man found himself “thrown helpless
upon the wilderness by that disaster.” The orphaned child thus “grew up in a savage state,
until he now bears only the outward resemblance to humanity.”1
In the winter of 1856, the Wild Man's path again crossed that of “civilized men”
when a party of hunters with dogs caught a glimpse of him near the Red River and gave
chase. Desperately trying to escape the dogs, the Wild Man ran out onto a small frozen
lake. He fell through the ice and began to swim and wade across, cracking the thin ice as
he surged forward. One of his pursuers circled around the lake on horseback and set an
ambush for him in the thick brush. As the Wild Man crawled out of the lake, the hunter
laid down his gun and set upon him, hoping to capture him alive. Feet away from his

1 “A Wild Man of the Woods,” Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette, May 26, 1851, 1.
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goal, the hunter was later able to describe the Wild Man as “a stout and athletic man,
about six feet four inches in height, covered in hair of a brownish caste about four to six
inches long.” Cornered by the hunter, the Wild Man turned on his pursuer, grabbing him
and violently throwing him to the ground. First ripping off the saddle and reins, the Wild
Man jumped upon the hunter’s horse and galloped off. One of the hunter's companions
attended to his injuries, while the others, along with a band of “friendly Indians,” set off
to continue their pursuit of the creature.2
Powerful and covered in hair, the Wild Man of Arkansas was but one of many
men and women whom nineteenth-century Americans believed to have the misfortune of
suffering the degenerative power of nature. That power stripped away their humanity,
leaving man-beasts condemned to live out wild lives in the wilderness that had created
them. Americans called these creatures Wild Men or, depending on the being's age and
gender, Wild Children or Wild Women. The defining characteristics of Wild Men were
their hairy bodies, wilderness abode, and great physical strength. They often carried a
stick or club, ate raw or “uncivilized” foods, and lacked speech and other perceived signs
of civilization and culture. Though the adjunctive “wild” was almost universally used by
Americans from the eighteenth to early twentieth century, the term is somewhat
misleading in describing the nature of Wild Men.
American Wild Men like the Wild Man of Arkansas could better be described as
feral rather than wild, for their condition was not inherent or permanent. It was not that
they had never known human civilization or had never inhabited domesticated
landscapes, but that they had become dislocated from those places and forces that kept

2 “The Wild Man Again,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1856, 1.

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men civilized and human. Thus the difference between a man and a Wild Man was not
like the difference between a domesticated dog and a wolf. It was closer to the difference
between a domesticated dog and a domesticated dog that had grown up outside the care
of human beings. A Wild Man was a man who became wild, not one for whom wildness
was an original state. Wildness, and its physical manifestations—such as a body covered
with hair and endowed with great strength—lay over the “normal” man beneath. Thus
there remained the possibility that, exposed to a civilized environment, the Wild Man
would revert back to being simply a man.
While these beings may be better described as feral people, I have chosen to use
the term Wild Man, as that was how almost all Americans referred to these beings and is
the term most often used in the secondary literature on the topic. Further, following the
general historic usage of “man” or “men” to describe individuals regardless of sex or age,
I have used the broader term Wild Men to include all types of Wild People unless a
particular individual was described by a historic source as a Wild Woman, Wild Girl or
Wild Boy.3 I have also chosen to capitalize the term Wild Man, even if it was not always
done in the source material, in order to differentiate the figure that is the subject of this
work from a normal person merely described as wild.
The idea that Wild Men were feral people is also useful for understanding the
American Wild Man, because it differentiates him from the savage in Euro-American
culture. While the feral American Wild Man was a normal person who underwent a
transformation in which he lost his relationship with humanity, the savage was simply a

3 I considered using the gender- and age-neutral term “Wild People” as a catch-all phrase, but my research
has revealed only one primary source that uses that term. I wish to maintain the original sources’
understandings of these feral people in their original context as well as the sources’ gender biases and
assumptions.
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