The Great Mammoth Hoax

Woolly mammoths became extinct thousands of years ago. But in October, 1899 a story appeared in McClure's Magazine titled "The Killing of the Mammoth" in which a narrator named H. Tukeman described how he had recently hunted down and killed a mammoth in the Alaskan wilderness.

According to the tale, Tukeman was traveling through Alaska in 1890. At Fort Yukon he met an old Indian named Joe whom he showed some pictures from a scrapbook. One of the pictures happened to be of an elephant. Seeing the picture, Joe became excited and told Tukeman he had once seen a similar creature living in a nearby mountain valley.

Tukeman decided to find the creature. He hired an Indian guide, and together the two men traveled to the location described by Joe. Sure enough, they found the creature still there, bathing in a mountain river: "There he stood in a little clearing, the great beast that only one other living man had seen, tearing up great masses of lichenous moss and feeding as an elephant feeds."


Working on the premise that the creature would be attracted to smoke, the two men built a large bonfire, and, as expected, the mammoth eventually rushed over to inspect the blaze. When the animal was near, the two men shot it repeatedly from their hiding place in the trees until it was dead.

As the mammoth was dying Tukeman admitted feeling some guilt: "A feeling of pity and shame crept over me as I watched the failing strength of this mighty prehistoric monarch whom I had outwitted and despoiled of a thousand years of harmless existence." When the mammoth lay dead, the two men carefully preserved its hide and bones by burying them in the ground. Then they roasted and ate some of the meat, finding it "not unpalatable, but terribly tough."

The two men traveled back to San Francisco, where Tukeman met a naturalist called Mr. Conradi. Mr. Conradi offered him millions of dollars to purchase the remains of the mammoth. Tukeman accepted the offer and journeyed back to the site where he had buried the creature, disinterred it, and transferred its remains into Mr. Conradi's possession. The story ended with Tukeman noting, "the most generally accepted theory heretofore has been that Mr. Conradi found the carcass frozen in an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean. The measurements exactly as taken by me, were handed to the Smithsonian, and accepted without question as his own."

This tale was pure fiction, and was labelled as such in McClure's table of contents. Nevertheless, huge numbers of readers were fooled by the realistic tone of the narrative and wrote both to the magazine and to the Smithsonian expressing outrage that the last mammoth had been shot. So many people wrote in that the magazine had to publish a statement in a subsequent issue explaining that "The Killing of the Mammoth" had simply been a work of fiction. Their statement read:

• Besse, Nancy L. "The Great Mammoth Hoax". Alaska Journal 1980 10(4): 10-16.

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