Smithsonian - November 2024 USA

REDISCOVERING AS THE NAZIS AMASSED WHAT RENAISSANCE
THE LOST ART OF POWER, A JEWISH ACTOR PAINTINGS REVEAL

WILDLIFE TRACKING HID IN PLAIN SIGHT ABOUT ANCIENT FRUIT
NOVEMBER 2024 • S M I T H S O N I A N M AG.C O M
THE
L A KO TA
AND THE
THE HISTORY OF A LIT TLE-K NOW N AT ROCIT Y—

L EG ACY
A N D T H E PAT H TOWA R D R ECONCIL I AT ION OF
BLUE
WAT E R
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Discover the Beauty of

Alishan National Scenic Area
Majestic mountains cover over 70 percent of
Taiwan. Alishan National Scenic Area, known for
its spectacular sunrises, lush green forests, elegant
ƲƇ٪ǍƇƫƲǾ ٪ƇǾƫ٪Ƈƣ ǾƫƇǾ٪˚Ʋ˛ǛƲ ٪Ǜ ٪ȉǾƲ٪ȉǌ٪ǕƲ٪
country’s most breathtaking mountain regions
to explore.
The best way to see it is aboard the
Alishan Forest Railway, which takes
you on an over 44-mile journey beginning
at 98 feet above sea level and climbing
to 7,270 feet. You will even pass through
four different climates on this adventure.
Immerse yourself in the rich
cultural heritage of the indigenous
Tsou people, who are happy to share
their music, leatherworks, colorful
weavings and wood carvings.
½ƇǛɦƇǾ٪Ǜ ٪ǯǾȉɦǾ٪ǌȉ٪ ȉǼƲ٪ȉǌ٪ǕƲ٪˚ǾƲ ٪
teas in the world, such as the alpine
Oolong tea, Jinxuan tea and green tea,
so take time to learn about Taiwanese
tea culture by attending a traditional
tea ceremony at one of the many tea
gardens in Alishan National Scenic Area.
Nature lovers can delight in viewing the twinkle Enjoy NOW
ȉǌ٪Ƈƣ ǾƫƇǾ٪˚Ʋ˛ǛƲ ٪ǛǾ٪ƲɥƲɬ٪ ƲƇ ȉǾ٪ƫ Ʋ٪ȉ٪ǕƲ٪ To learn more, visit:
|variety of species that appear at different times, eng.taiwan.net.tw and ali-nsa.net/en
but the most spectacular sightings usually
happen from late spring to early summer.
With its unique geographical and cultural diversity,
Alishan National Scenic Area offers many ways to
experience its beauty.
Vol. 55 | No. 05 November 2024
features
38
The Living Memory
64
Relearning the
of Blue Water Language of
In 1855, a U.S. Army the Land
attack devastated a The ancient art of wild-
Lakota community in life tracking is making a
present-day Nebraska. comeback as biologists
How recovering the discover the rich data
history of a little- that can be gleaned
known massacre is from the marks animals
bringing healing to a leave behind
generational tragedy by Ben Goldfarb
by Tim Madigan
54 76
The Fruit Detective
Birds on the Brink Follow one passionate
On New Zealand’s polymath as she scours
South Island, conser- Renaissance paintings,
vationists are going to stately palazzos and
extraordinary lengths secluded monastery
to save the yellow-eyed gardens in her fervid
penguin from extinc- endeavor to solve the
tion—removing hatch- centuries-spanning
lings from their nests, case of Italy’s missing
Mele striate d’estate—summer streaked apples—flourish in
hand-rearing the chicks Isabella Dalla Ragione’s orchard, where she cultivates long- heritage fruit trees
and even plying them forgotten varieties plucked from the annals of Renaissance art. by Mark Schapiro
with fish smoothies
by Alex Fox
56 prologue
05 Discussion
08 Institutional Knowledge
15
S I M O N A G H I Z ZO N I ; D E TA I L : B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES
The Role of His Life by Lonnie G. Bunch III

After the Nazis came 88 Crossword
to power in Germany, 13 American Icon: Macy’s Our monthly puzzle
the Austrian Jewish Thanksgiving Day parade 92 Ask Smithsonian
performer Leo Reuss • Memorable musical acts You’ve got questions.
We’ve got experts
decided to put his 18 Democracy: Art of persuasion
acting chops to the test, 27 Enterprise: Striking it rich
disguising himself as • Really big deals
Cover: Karen Little Thunder returns
an Aryan farmer from 34 National Treasure to the site of the Blue Water Massa-
the Alps so he could The truth about an early cre near Lewellen, Nebraska, where
polygraph machine her ancestors were slain by U.S. Army
return to the stage soldiers almost 170 years ago.
by Tomas Weber 36 Archives: The book chief Photograph by Jaida Grey Eagle
November 2024 | SMITHSONIAN 3

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discussion
MAGAZINE
X (TWITTER): @SmithsonianMag
INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine
FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine
blood of the Spaniards permeates modern Latin

America; they were rightly called conquistadores.
Edward Ryan | El Segundo, California
Learning More of MacArthur

Your article (“MacArthur Down Under,” Septem-
ber/October 2024) revealed some little-known
facts about the iconic general and his exploits
during World War II. I knew that he had been sent
to Australia to start forming an army, but I knew
nothing of the town where it all began and the
conditions there when he arrived.
His “demanding ego and Robert S. Colson Jr. | Franklin, Tennessee
military accomplishments Giving glory to the man who abandoned POWs

does not sit well with me. A dear uncle of mine
both loom large.” was in the Bataan Death March, and he survived
a “hell ship” to Japan and slave labor in a mill at
Kokura. MacArthur was a vain glory seeker, and
his actions cost thousands of lives.
Curtis N. Craft | Dundas, Virginia
The Path to Independence
I thoroughly enjoyed Alexis Coe’s excellent arti- General Douglas MacArthur’s demanding ego
cle (“Freedom’s First Draft,” September/October and military accomplishments both loom large
2024) on the sometimes overlooked First Conti- as testaments to leadership in times of war. Your
nental Congress. As we approach the 250th an- article highlighted the man as a historical figure
niversary of our nation, this semiquincentennial in all his flaws and genuine successes.
provides the perfect opportunity to honor this Robert L. Starr | Ephrata, Pennsylvania
bold 1774 meeting of the American colonies. Meet Smithsonian’s
Andrew A. Zellers-Frederick | journalists on our Floating Inspiration
Haddonfield, New Jersey podcast, “There’s It was appropriate that Jackie Wullschläger quot-
More to That.”
ed the late great art critic Robert Hughes in the ex-
English Roots SCAN TO SUBSCRIBE cerpt (“Lasting Impressions,” September/October
From linguistics, I must question the concept of a 2024) of her forthcoming biography of Monet, be-
gentle blending of the Germanic and Celtic peo- cause her sumptuous, detailed writing definitely
ples (“How England Became England,” Septem- equals his. I truly attained a new understanding of
ber/October 2024). Only a few Celtic words have Monet’s obsession with capturing the ever-chang-
survived into English, as expected for the speech ing textures of the water lilies at Giverny.
of a subjugated race. By contrast, the Norman con- Stephen Conn | Las Cruces, New Mexico
querors infused the Saxons’ language with their
version of French and transformed it to what we Clarification: In “String Theory” (September/October
2024), we mused that whenever you play air guitar
call English. As for the proven genetic mix, blend- to “Free Bird,” you’re playing on a classic Fender
Stratocaster. While the solo on the song’s recording was
ing of that sort occurs readily without the eager played on a Gibson rather than a Fender, air guitar so-
consent of the conquered. For one example, the loists can imagine whichever model they most cherish.
Send letters to LettersEd@si.edu or to Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.
C O N TA C T Include a telephone number and address. Letters may be edited for clarity or space. Because of the high volume of
US mail we receive, we cannot respond to all letters. Send queries about the Smithsonian Institution to info@si.edu or to
OVS, Public Inquiry Mail Service, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.

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institutional knowledge
LONNIE G. BUNCH III, SECRETARY MAGAZINE
Africans to Brazil. The site was discovered in 2023

through the efforts of Brazilian partners with the
Slave Wrecks Project, an international collaboration
hosted by the National Museum of African American
History and Culture (NMAAHC).
During the trip, Elizabeth Bagley, the U.S. am-
bassador to Brazil, and I announced the launch of
“Afro-Connections,” an exchange program working
with Brazilian organizations to promote museum
work that illustrates the struggles for freedom of
people of African descent.
This collaborative work will take root in the upcom-
ing exhibition “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Free-
dom in the World,” a NMAAHC-led project, which
I L LU ST R AT I O N R E F E R E N C E P H OTO : M I C H A E L BA R N ES / S M I T H S O N I A N I N ST I T U T I O N A R C H I V ES ; N M A A H C © C H EST E R H I G G I N S, A L L R I G H TS R ES E RV E D
will embody that same spirit of resilience, resistance
A Global Reckoning and healing. Opening December 13 at NMAAHC, the

first of six museums on four continents it will visit
“IN SLAVERY’S WAKE,” AN INTERNATIONAL (the second stop is in Brazil), this project includes
EXHIBITION SET TO DEBUT NEXT MONTH,
ILLUMINATES THE UNFINISHED WORK several Valongo artifacts, interactive media, art and
OF SECURING FREEDOM newly filmed oral histories detailing how the legacy
of slavery and colonialism shapes our world. “In Slav-
ery’s Wake” will demonstrate our shared connections
to this history and illuminate how the unfinished
AM CONTINUALLY IMPRESSED with work of freedom is essential to our future.
I the Smithsonian’s ability to connect Weighted with history yet full of hope, my visit to
us to the world and each other while Brazil was enlightening, inspiring and joyful. While
tackling our most important and ur- most of what I received was intangible, I was given a
gent issues. I was reminded of that in small container of the soil members of the descen-
May, during my first visit to Brazil, a dant communities had brought from their homes to
vast and vibrant country profoundly shaped by slav- pour over the wreck site of the Camargo. This item
ery. It was the destination of approximately 40 per- will join NMAAHC’s collection as a potent symbol of
cent of the more than 12 million enslaved Africans the full history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and
who were forcibly brought to the Americas. the healing power of remembering and reckoning
I grasped the enormity of this history when I with that history.
visited Valongo Wharf, Rio de Janeiro’s
largest disembarkation point for Africans
Ancestral Me- transported to the Americas. The violent
morial, Coney
Island, a photo- history there stands in contrast to the hu-
graph in the ex- man stories of resistance and resilience I
hibition, depicts
women honoring saw reflected in artifacts retrieved from
enslaved African the Valongo archaeological site, includ-
ancestors of the
Middle Passage. ing shells, beads and pipes Africans had
brought with them.
This complex history was poignantly
underscored about 105 miles west of Rio.
LEARN MORE
about the new There, at the point where the mouth of the
exhibition and its
companion book at Bracuí River meets the sea, lie the remains
Smithsonianmag. of the Camargo, one of the last document-
com/wake
ed vessels to have transported enslaved
8 SMITHSONIAN | November 2024 Portrait illustration by Jurell Cayetano

The
Smithsonian
is as much
about today
and tomorrow
as it is about
yesterday.
LONNIE G. BUNCH III
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
JOIN US
smithsoniancampaign.org
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T H E PAST IS
A M E R I CA N I C O N
By
Michael Callahan
G E T T Y I M AG ES ; P H OTO G R A P H C O LO R I Z AT I O N BY DA N A K E L L E R
A colorized
photo of su-
perhero rodent
Mighty Mouse’s
exuberant turn
in the 1951
parade.
Floating on Air
A century on, the country’s most beloved Thanksgiving
spectacle reaches new heights

prologue
A M E R I CA N I C O N
HAT FIRST PARADE, held on a relatively mild

Thanksgiving Day in 1924, was extolled as “a mar-
athon of mirth” in splashy newspaper ads. It was
actually more akin to a modest church carnival on
wheels. Comprising a few marching bands, some
clowns, some Mother Goose-themed floats and a
small menagerie of animals on loan from Manhat-
tan’s Central Park Zoo that occasionally terrified
onlooking children with their howls and growls,
the procession managed to trudge a staggering six
miles, from 145th Street all the way down to Herald
Square, to its final destination: R.H. Macy & Compa-
ny, America’s largest department store.
Despite its modest offerings, the parade still drew
a crowd: By the time Santa, pulling up the rear, de-
scended from his sleigh and climbed a ladder to sit birth of a new annual tradition that would become
The Radio City
on an ornate gold throne above the store’s brand-new Rockettes, seen as much a part of Thanksgiving as turkey, pumpkin
entrance on 34th Street, an estimated 10,000 people in sequined pie or football.
glory in 1966,
were there to cheer him on. It was a crowning achieve- first kicked their While Macy’s wasn’t the nation’s first Thanksgiv-
ment in more ways than one: Macy’s was celebrating way into the ing Day spectacle—that honor goes to Philadelphia’s
proceedings
its just-completed expansion to one million square in 1957. Gimbels parade, launched four years earlier—over
feet of retail space, which now gobbled up an entire time it set the standard for what an American parade
city block from Broadway to Seventh Avenue. could be. Whether you have stood amid the crush-
With a blare of his shiny trumpet, Kris Kringle ing throng, jumping up and down to gawk at a giant
sounded the call for the Macy’s windows to reveal Popeye, or simply watched the affair while pleasant-
their holiday displays, which the store had brand- ly sinking into your sofa, the enrapturing spell of the
ed “The Fair Frolics of Wondertown.” Macy’s parade—the undeniable pull
Spectators rushed to the windows, rev- of its sheer, overwhelming American-
eling in the dancing marionettes be- ness—never quite fades.
hind the glass. WHEN YOU GO Macy’s marketing established the
The parade merited barely a mention TO THE PARADE, parade as a clever, homespun tradition
in the next day’s papers, but based on YOU UNCONSCIOUSLY to remind people to start buying Christ-
the crowd size, Macy’s thought it had ENTER A SPACE THAT’S mas gifts. Two factors came to cement
a hit on its hands, soon placing ads de- SACRED. its status as communal annual ritual
claring that “we did not dare dream its for the nation. The first was the birth
success would be so great.” It was the of television, which, starting in 1948,
14 SMITHSONIAN | November 2024

beamed the extravaganza into liv-
ing rooms nationwide. The other
would become the crown jewel of
A Most Musical Motorcade
the parade’s unabashedly hokey SOME OF THE BRASSIEST ACTS TO GRACE THE
EVENT OVER SIX TUNEFUL DECADES
pageantry: its collection of majes-
By Chris Klimek
tic balloons, beginning with a two-
story Felix the Cat in 1927. The
THE MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE was a generation-old tradition
balloons got ever bigger and more when organizers decided to dial up the excitement by adding star perform-
elaborate each year: an inflated ers to the event in the late 1950s. But it wasn’t easy to stage a genuine con-
army of Snoopys, Underdogs, Bull- cert on a moving vehicle in cold weather during a live television broadcast.
winkles and Yogi Bears lazily bob- So starting in 1964, the performers would often lip-sync to a playback of
music they’d recorded earlier. Here are some of the most memorable musical
bing their way between skyscrap- acts that have gotten America tapping our toes before turkey time.
ers, each onlooker’s face turned
skyward in worship. In the early
years, the balloons were released
into the air afterward, with a return
address provided and a reward as
high as $100 offered for each one’s
return; locating and retrieving the
errant, deflated behemoths be-
came a treasure hunt for area thrill
chasers. That tradition lasted un-
til 1932, when 22-year-old student
aviator Annette Gibson attempted
to catch the 60-foot-long balloon
of Tom Cat with her small aircraft,
entangling a wing and sending her
plane plunging into a tailspin over
Jamaica, Queens. Gibson’s flying
instructor took over the controls
and landed them safely.
Over the decades, the parade has
evolved into a massive panorama:
In 1948, there were 17 floats, six balloons and a few
bands; this year’s parade will include 27 floats, a
dozen marching bands from across the country,
more than 60 balloons, five to seven Broadway
numbers, various dance and cheer routines, the
G E T T Y I M AG ES ; R E U T E RS / J E F F C H R I ST E N S E N / B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES
occasional chart-topping singer and, of course,

those legendary, leggy Radio City Rockettes, a fix-
ture since 1958.
Last year more than 28 million people viewed 1958 1973
BENNY GOODMAN GEORGE JONES
at home, the largest audience ever. For them, the AND HIS SEXTET AND TAMMY WYNETTE
Macy’s parade is far more than a procession of The King of Swing, who’d appeared The volatile but prolific country music
in the 1934 and 1937 parades as a power couple performed “We’re Gon-
glittery floats and chorine kick lines. Creating a non-performing celebrity guest, finally na Hold On,” the title track from the
got to cook this year on the standard second album of duets they released
mere spectacle is one thing. But creating a shared “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” that year. They would divorce in 1975.
sense of national belonging—a piercing pride in
being an American, in an era marked by tragic 1980 1996
division—is a feat for the ages. “When you go to SISTER SLEDGE BO DIDDLEY
If ever a song was designed to be The Captain & Tennille, Vanessa
the parade,” says historian Doug Matthews, au- performed atop a festive, slow-mov- Williams and the cast of “Sesame
thor of the 2022 book Why We Love Parades: Their ing barge making its way south Street” were there, too, but only the
down a Manhattan thoroughfare, then-67-year-old creator of the Bo
History and Enduring Appeal, “you unconscious- it’s the irrepressibly welcoming R&B/ Diddley Beat ventured a self-di-
ly enter a space that’s sacred.” A miracle on 34th disco anthem “We Are Family,” agnosis, performing his new single
released just 22 months earlier—but “Bo Diddley Is Crazy” atop the Tom
Street, indeed. already a classic. Turkey float (above).

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prologue
D E M O C R ACY
By
Jonathan W. White
D R AW I N G I N T H E VOT E
During and after the Civil War, inventive
artistry turned American ballots into
powerful propaganda
N THE MID-19TH century, election
I ballots were created by political par-

ties, not the government. Local Re-
publican and Democratic operatives
designed and printed their own bal-
lots, also called tickets, which typi-
cally listed each party’s candidates for state,
local and federal office. At the polls, voters
procured ballots from party workers and, af-
ter walking through a crowd, dropped their
votes into a ballot box, typically a glass bowl.
With no secrecy in how one voted, violence
and intimidation became common, particu-
larly in urban precincts.
To capture the attention of voters on Elec-
tion Day, local party organizations often
turned their ballots into miniature works of
L I N C O L N F I N A N C I A L F O U N DAT I O N C O L L ECT I O N , C O U RT ESY O F T H E A L L E N C O U N T Y P U B L I C L I B R A RY

art, using patriotic and partisan symbols to
appeal to voters. Such artwork also had prac-
tical uses: Illiterate or non-English-speaking
voters might be drawn to a ballot that seemed
to represent their political views. In many
cases, voters did not even bother to read the
names on the ballots, enabling some un-
scrupulous politicos to use their opponents’
symbols to trick inattentive voters. One semi-literate and detailed examples, the Grant Club of San Fran-
The front of this
voter admitted in 1863, “I cannot say exactly whether 1864 Ohio ballot, cisco, a Republican organization with a thousand
I read the ticket or not; mostly I get the ticket from a right, features members, printed ballots depicting the 1864 Battle of
patriotic slogans
man, knowing his politics, and knowing that he feels and symbols— Cherbourg, an important naval engagement between
as I feel myself.” plus, on the the Union and the Confederacy, in which the USS
back, left, lyrics
When President Abraham Lincoln ran for re-elec- from the popular Kearsarge defeated the CSS Alabama off the north-
tion in 1864, Republicans throughout the nation song “The Battle western coast of France. When members of the Grant
Cry of Freedom.”
printed ballots with pro-war and pro-Union symbols, Club marched to Bay Area polls on November 8 for
slogans and song lyrics. In one of the most beautiful that year’s presidential election, they proudly carried
the Lincoln tickets they’d designed and printed.
Ballots often featured portraits of a party’s most
popular candidates. Lincoln would continue to ap-
VIOLENCE AND INTIMIDATION pear on Republican tickets well into the postwar
BECAME COMMON, PARTICULARLY years, inspiring Northern Civil War veterans to vote
IN URBAN PRECINCTS. as they had shot—against Southern Democrats—
even once the guns had fallen silent.

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prologue
ENTERPRISE
by Illustration by
Melanie Haiken Sonia Pulido
Queen
XHAUSTED AND HUNGRY, the pros-
pectors stumbled into Dawson City in
the late summer of 1898 after a grueling
of the
journey—and found what must have
seemed a mirage. Before them towered
a three-story hotel, light streaming
Klondike
through the windows from cut-crystal
chandeliers and gleaming off the brass
and mahogany bar. Inside the Fair View
Hotel, its diminutive proprietor, Belinda Mulrooney, prof-
fered menus boasting oysters and steak.
With flinty perseverance Mulrooney’s success, as a woman and an Irish immigrant
and a golden touch, Belinda with little education, was as improbable as the Fair View’s
Mulrooney created an unlikely remote glamour. Only 26 when she opened the hotel in July
empire in the frozen north of 1898, in two short years she’d come to be known as the

prologue
ENTERPRISE
richest woman in the Klondike, overseeing an em- carnival strip and built on it, renting and then sell-
pire that extended from hotels, restaurants and real Belinda Mul- ing the property at considerable profit, which she
rooney, center
estate development to mining companies, banks, c. 1905, inspects used to buy a popular restaurant nearby. As the fair
even utilities. It’s a swashbuckling story, one marked an 88-ounce closed, Mulrooney learned that San Francisco was
nugget in front
by constant self-reinvention that saw Mulrooney of the Dome planning its own exposition and took her profits
help build a city, make and lose several fortunes, and City bank she westward, where she repeated her real estate specu-
founded.
leave a lasting legacy as a Yukon pioneer. lations. But when an 1895 fire in an uninsured build-
Yet Mulrooney’s legacy remains little known out- ing left her penniless, it was time to start over.
side the frozen north. “I think she’s certainly up The Fair View This time she found success in merchant ven-
Hotel in Dawson,
there with significant women who had an impact on which Mulrooney tures, bootlegging whiskey and other coveted sup-
Alaska, and she hasn’t been given the prominence opened in July plies aboard the steamship City of Topeka between
1898, was a tow-
that she deserves,” says Jo Antonson, executive di- ering presence Seattle and southern Alaska—then reselling goods
rector of the Alaska Historical Society. A true reckon the town’s at frontier prices. She opened a store in Juneau and
landscape.
oning of Mulrooney’s life reveals her as a hero of the was scanning the landscape for opportunity when
frontier—and perhaps its canniest business owner. a prospector strolled into town, showing off some
of the gold nuggets he’d found in what seemed like
BORN IN 1872 in County Sligo, Ireland, Mulrooney a promising strike in the Klondike. Instantly, Mul-
stayed behind when her parents emigrated to Amer- rooney began outfitting for an expedition that would
ica and spent her childhood on her maternal grand- change her life, and the frozen frontier, forever.
parents’ farm, surrounded by boys. That experience Getting to the Klondike gold fields in 1897 required
shaped her and inspired her legendary drive. “I astonishing mettle. The majority of stampeders, as
never expected any favors,” Mulrooney told writ- new arrivals were known, came via a brutal overland
er Helen Lyon Hawkins, who conducted a series of trek, each explorer hauling gear by sled over the icy,
interviews in the late 1920s for a biography that was 3,550-foot Chilkoot Pass. Mulrooney’s supplies re-
never published. “I knew a woman around men who quired 30 such trips. Then came the two-week jour-
couldn’t do her share is a nuisance and is left behind, ney down the turbulent Yukon River to Dawson, for
so I tried to be in the front always, to lead.” which travelers had to build their own boats.
Thirteen when she finally joined her parents in Mulrooney landed in Dawson in April 1897, one of
the U.S., Mulrooney was unimpressed by life in the the first entrepreneurs on the scene. In an often-told
WIKI COMMONS; ALAMY
coal town of Archbald, Pennsylvania, and soon took anecdote, Mulrooney describes tossing her one re-
a position as a nanny for a wealthy Philadelphia fam- maining coin in the river for luck, announcing with
LEARN HOW
ily. After the economic crash of 1891, Mulrooney took Jack London found breezy confidence: “I’ll start clean.”
his muse in the
her savings to Chicago, sensing opportunity in the Yukon at But it wasn’t luck that made Belinda Mulrooney
Smithsonian rich; it was her unerring ability to anticipate what
city’s preparations for the 1893 World’s Fair. mag.com/gold
Mulrooney purchased a lot just outside the fair’s people would most need. Her goods, including hot

prologue
ENTERPRISE
water bottles for miners enduring the frigid

winter in tents, netted a 600 percent profit
from that first trip. She also saw the miners
were desperate for a good meal and opened
an all-hours restaurant serving hearty home-
style fare.
Mulrooney’s eye for creative re-use proved
key in an undeveloped environment where
materials were scarce. “I started buying up all
the boats and rafts that were arriving, hired a
crew of young fellows who had nothing to do,
and had them build cabins,” she said of her
first Yukon real estate venture, which she
embarked on shortly after arriving. Those
cabins were soon selling for as much as
$4,000 apiece, or more than $150,000 today. electricity. When miners bet Mulrooney $5,000 that
Mulrooney
Mulrooney also had a canny instinct for location. opened her first she couldn’t keep the three-story building warm, she
During that first Yukon spring, she scouted ground hotel, the Grand bought an old steamboat boiler, attaching a sawmill
Forks, in 1897. A
on which to open her first hotel and chose the junc- fast success, it to provide the fuel. Mulrooney modernized the town
tion of the two busiest gold-mining creeks, 16 miles established her in other ways, too, helping bring Dawson its first
as a formidable
outside of Dawson. The Grand Forks quickly be- businesswoman telephone and telegraph, housing the switchboard
came the miners’ primary gathering place and soon of the Yukon. in the Fair View, and forming the Hygeia Water Sup-
doubled as an official collection office for royalties ply Company to provide safe drinking water. It was
demanded by the Canadian government. At night less than two years since she arrived in Dawson, and
Mulrooney put the floor sweepings through a sluice, already she was one of its foremost citizens.
gleaning an extra $100 or so in gold dust daily. Per- “She really loomed large in the history of Dawson
fectly positioned for intelligence-gathering, she in- City,” says Angharad Wenz, director of the Dawson
City Museum, adding that if we were to credit a sin-
gle person with bringing the Klondike into the 20th
century, Mulrooney would be the prime candidate.
I WAS YOUNG WHEN I WENT
THERE FULL OF HOPE. AS SHARP-EYED as she was in business, Mulrooney
proved less so in matters of the heart. Disaster came
courting in the form of a sham European nobleman,
“Count” Charles Eugene Carbonneau—actually a
vested accordingly and by the end of 1897 owned five French Canadian barber from Montreal—whom Mul-
gold claims—plus almost 20 percent of one of the rooney wed in Dawson City on October 1, 1900.
region’s wealthiest mining companies. Newspapers around the country published rhap-
Ever the expansionist, Mulrooney set out to build sodic descriptions of the lavish wedding and fol-
the finest hotel in Dawson City, one modeled on the lowed the Carbonneaus on their honeymoon tour of
elegant hotels she’d seen in Chicago and San Fran- Europe, running photographs of Mulrooney wear-
cisco. Calling it the Fair View, Mulrooney was metic- ing furs and jewels in a mansion the couple rent-
ulous in choosing the lace curtains, plush carpets, ed in Nice. The next few years found the Carbon-
brass bedsteads and other finery that would make neaus wintering in Paris, in an apartment near the
her new hotel the envy of the region’s other hote- Champs-Élysées with a bevy of servants.
liers, who housed most guests in rough dormitories. BYLINES But Carbonneau’s profligate spending, dubious
When explorer Mary E. Hitchcock arrived in Dawson investments and mismanagement of Mulrooney’s
Melanie Haiken
in June 1898, she was deeply impressed and detailed is a journalist mining companies emptied the couple’s bank ac-
based in the San
her reaction in her 1899 memoir, Two Women in the Francisco Bay counts. Leaving the con man in France, where he
Klondike: “The menu, beginning with ‘oyster cock- Area. was soon to be convicted of swindling and embezzle-
WIKI COMMONS
tails,’ caused us to open our eyes wide with aston- Sonia Pulido, ment, Mulrooney returned to Dawson alone in 1904.
who has illustrated
ishment, after all that the papers have told us of the numerous books Forced to start over yet again, she regathered her
starvation about Dawson.” and graphic energies and in the spring of 1905 followed the next
novels, lives near
The Fair View was the first property in town to have Barcelona. gold strike to Fairbanks, some 400 miles east of

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prologue
ENTERPRISE
Dawson City, buying up claims in partnership with a photo taken in her 60s, she stands proudly in front
fellow investors. She also purchased several building of the seafaring equipment she maintained.
lots and opened a bank in nearby Dome City. By the Still, it was her memories of the Klondike that
time Mulrooney filed for divorce from Carbonneau Mulrooney most prized. Of her fondness for that
in July 1906, she was flush once again. wild country, she recalled poignantly: “I was young
Perhaps foreseeing the inevitable bust of the Alas- when I went there full of hope.” Later in life, Mul-
kan claims, Mulrooney decamped to Washington rooney took special pleasure in her membership
State’s fertile Yakima Valley, where she ran a 20-acre in the male-only Yukon Order of Pioneers, which
farm and orchard, built an imposing stone castle, made an exception for her mining achievements
and reigned there into the 1920s. Locals came to refer and civic service.
to her as the Countess Carbonneau. But this attempt In 1957, her money mostly gone, Mulrooney moved
at a bucolic life didn’t prove profitable: She sold the to a senior care facility in Seattle, where she died in
acreage at a loss, leased the castle and moved to a 1967 at the age of 95. The obituary of the most daring
modest cottage in Seattle, where she ended her ca- self-made woman of the period read simply: “Born in
reer in humble fashion, de-rusting minesweepers in Ireland, she came to Seattle in 1925. Mrs. Carbonneau
the shipyards during and after World War II. Though was in the Klondike in 1898.” Her small footstone in
no longer commanding an empire, Mulrooney con- the city’s Holyrood Cemetery bears only dates, and a
tinued to prize her self-reliance and practical skill; in name: B.A. Carbonneau.
Show Me the Money

THE KLONDIKE GOLD RUSH YIELDED AROUND $1 BILLION IN
VALUE IN 2024 DOLLARS. HERE’S HOW THAT STACKS UP
By Sonja Anderson
C H A RT: E R I T R E A D O R C E LY; S O U R C ES : M O N T I C E L LO ; B U S I N ES S I N S I D E R ; T H E AT L A N T I C ; P B S ; ES P N ; F O R B ES
BLUBBER BAGGING THE SHOW BOAT PLAY BALL! BUY ME THE GOLDEN
BUCKS WEST One of the In 2020, the TO THE MOON STATE
The massive In 1803, France world’s priciest wealthy Wilpon NASA’s Apollo 11 During Cali-
whaling industry exchanged superyachts, the family sold the mission cost fornia’s gold
along the North- 828,000 square Eclipse is owned New York Mets for an estimated rush, hopefuls
eastern coast of miles of land by a Russian $2.4 billion, $355 million in came from as
the U.S. harvest- west of the businessman the most expen- 1969 (about far as China. In
Mississippi River and valued at 1852—the most
ed blubber from
to the United
sive purchase $3 billion
the sea creatures
States for $15
$1.6 billion. of a franchise today). Before profitable year
of that particular
each season. The superyacht to date in stepping out of the
Around the time million, around is a whop- Major League boom—miners
lunar module, Buzz
of Moby-Dick’s $418 million ping 533 feet Baseball. Aldrin took com- harvested $81
million worth, or
publication in today. The sale long—58 yards munion: modest
In billions 1851, American put a definitive longer than a wine and bread in $3.3 billion
whalers were end to Napo- football field— a priceless venue. today.
$3.5 contributing leon’s dream and boasts
around of a French two swimming
$10 million empire in North pools and two
$3.0 (roughly America. helipads, plus
$408 million a miniature
$2.5 today) to the submarine for
national GDP. casual undersea
excursions.
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prologue
N AT I O N A L T R E AS U R E
The Truth
of the
Matter N ORDER TO CATCH LIARS, the an-
cient Chinese would sometimes give
the accused a mouthful of uncooked
The early polygraph machine rice during interrogation—and then
was considered the most scientific ask the person to open wide. Dry rice
way to detect deception— would indicate a dry mouth, consid-
but that was a myth ered evidence of nervous guilt—and
sometimes grounds for execution.
The notion that lying produces ob-
servable physical side effects has stuck with us, and
one man thought he’d cracked the science of lie de-
tection in the 1920s, amid a truly modern boom in
crime. This was the era of Prohibition, dominated
by bootlegging gangsters—Chicago alone was said
to be home to 1,300 gangs—and some police de-

By Photograph by
Susan Saulny Cade Martin
ALL LIARS,
REGARDLESS OF
CLEVERNESS, ARE
DOOMED.
partments adopted increasingly brutal tactics to son, who had recently received a PhD in physiolo-
FROM THE
wring the truth out of suspects: beating and burn- SMITHSONIAN
gy from the University of California, Berkeley, and
ing detainees with cigarettes, or depriving them of N AT I O N A L had a passion for justice. Larson joined the Berke-
MUSEUM OF
sleep. Unconstitutional but widely applied across AMERICAN ley force in 1920, becoming the first rookie in the
the nation, according to a major report commis- H I S TO R Y country with a doctorate.
sioned by then-President Herbert Hoover, these Vollmer and Larson were particularly intrigued
techniques did result in confessions—many of by the possibilities of a simple new deception test
them highly dubious. pioneered by William Marston, a lawyer and psy-
One police chief in California thought he could chologist who would later earn fame as the creator
usher in a new era in which science would make the of Wonder Woman, with her famous Lasso of Truth.
interrogation process more accurate and humane. (Marston unofficially used the test on some crim-
August Vollmer of the Berkeley Police Department inal defendants during probation proceedings.)
was a committed reformer who began recruiting Larson spent punishing hours creating a far more
college graduates to help professionalize the force. sophisticated test, tinkering in his university lab
His interests dovetailed with those of John A. Lar- on an odd-looking assemblage of pumps and

prologue
A R C H I V ES
gauges that he would attach to the human

body using an arm cuff and chest strap. His
device would measure changes in pulse, One for the Books
respiration and blood pressure all at once, THE SAVVY COLLEGE LIBRARIAN WHO HELPED
during continuous monitoring of a subject CREATE AN ICONIC NEW YORK MUSEUM
By Sonja Anderson
under interrogation. Larson believed the
contraption would flag false answers via dis-
tinct fluctuations etched by a stylus onto a
revolving drum of paper. An operator would
then analyze and interpret the results.
By the spring of 1921, Larson unveiled
the machine he called a cardio-pneumo-
psychogram, and later simply a polygraph,
a nod to the multiple physical signals re-
corded by the stylus. A San Francisco Ex-
aminer report later said it looked like some
mix of “a radio set, a stethoscope, a dentist’s
drill, a gas stove” and more, all arranged on
a long wooden table. However ramshackle it
Belle da Costa
appeared, Larson’s innovation, with its con- Greene, seen in 1911,
tinuous battery of measurements, leaped laid the groundwork
for the opening of the
beyond all previous attempts to track the Morgan Library &
body’s involuntary responses. In a frenzy of Museum in 1924,
where she served as
sensationalist reporting, the press dubbed the first director.
Larson’s polygraph a “lie detector,” and the
Examiner swooned: “All liars, regardless of
cleverness, are doomed.”
Larson himself didn’t quite buy the
hype. As he tested the invention, he found
T
OWARD THE END of the 19th century, J. Pierpont Morgan—the
an alarming error rate and grew increas- Gilded Age’s wolf of Wall Street—used some of his wealth to amass
ingly concerned about its official use. And a vast collection of books and art. He soon realized it needed a
while many departments across the country home, and a skilled caretaker. In 1905, Morgan’s bibliophilic neph-
ew recommended one of his co-workers in the library at Prince-
embraced the device, judges proved even
ton: Belle da Costa Greene. Summoned to an audience with the
more skeptical than Larson. As early as 1923, financier, she impressed Morgan and soon moved into an office in the newly
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of constructed building known as “Mr. Morgan’s Library” in Midtown Manhat-
Columbia ruled polygraph results inadmis- tan. She would remain at its helm for nearly the rest of her life, and after
sible at trial because the tests were not wide- Morgan’s death in 1913, she led the effort to make his vast private collection
accessible to all. Now, with the Morgan Library celebrating its centenary as
ly accepted by relevant experts. Still, cops a public institution, Greene is honored in a special exhibition. As co-cura-
kept using the machine. Larson watched in tor Erica Ciallela says, “There’s no real way to talk about the history of the
dismay as a former colleague patented an Morgan Library without talking about Belle da Costa Greene.”
updated version of the idea in 1931. Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879, to an elite Black family in Washing-
ton, D.C., Greene was raised by a single mother who eventually moved
While Larson’s original machine collect-
the children to New York City, shortening their last name. To improve her
ed dust, imitators with sleeker modern ver- children’s prospects, Greene’s mother decided they would “pass” as white;
sions proliferated, all hewing roughly to the Greene’s true race would remain a family secret until nearly 50 years after
same parameters as Larson’s—and millions her death. Having honed her librarian skills in summer school at Amherst
College, and at Princeton, the self-christened Belle da Costa Greene was
T H E M O R GA N L I B R A RY & M U S E U M (2 )
of people were subject to testing. During the

brilliant as Morgan’s personal librarian, cataloging his collection, guiding
Cold War, the State Department used poly-
acquisitions and helping scholars sift through the library’s holdings. When
graph tests to oust alleged Communist sym- Morgan died, his son, Jack, inherited most of the collection—on the condi-
pathizers and gay employees from the feder- tion that he make it publicly available. In 1924, the Pierpont Morgan Library
al government. Many innocent government opened its doors, with Greene as its inaugural director.
workers lost their livelihoods, while others “She was pioneering in the way she went about librarianship,” Ciallela
adds, noting that Greene was building a prominent career at a time when
who were eventually exposed as treason-
women lacked basic civil rights. “She’s one of the highest-paid women in the
ous—including the infamous spy Aldrich country in the 1920s. So to have that kind of clout and be able to say, ‘What
Ames—managed C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 90 I’m going to do with that is advance access to research,’ is incredible.”

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S ta u er… A ffo rd t he E xt r a o rd i na r y .®
AFTER THE U.S. ARMY MASSACRED
A Lakota village, D O Z E N S O F
PLUNDER ED A R T IFAC T S ENDED UP IN T HE
SMITHSONIAN. HOW recovering
the history O F A L I T T L E -
K N O W N A T R O C I T Y I S forging
a path T O W A R D
R EC O N C I L I AT I O N
Phil Little Thunder, a

great-great-grandchild
of the Lakota chief
whose village was
attacked in 1855. An
ancient cottonwood
known as the Witness
Tree, right, still stands.
by TIM MADIGAN
photographs by
JAIDA GREY EAGLE
THE
Living
Memory
Blue Water
OF

To reach the place known as Mni
Tho Wakpala, the Blue Water,
you drive west from the Nebraska hamlet
of Lewellen, turning from Highway 26 onto
a gravel road and turning again through
a gate that leads to fenced pastureland.
The ancient cottonwood, now known by
the Lakota Sioux as the Witness Tree, still
towers above the grasslands. Blue Water
Creek cuts a crooked path through a broad
valley, its waters still pristine.
On that hot, windy afternoon in September with their sacred chanupas, their pipes, per-
2023, the first of my three recent visits, it was haps reminiscing about the days when the wasi-
easy to imagine what had unfolded by that chu, the whites, were mere curiosities.
placid stream long ago. For the Lakota village Then, just after sunrise on September 3, 1855,
of a leader named Little Thunder, the buffalo 600 U.S. Army soldiers commanded by Brig-
hunt in late summer 1855 had been particularly adier General William S. Harney surrounded
bountiful. Some 40 tepees, home to about 200 and ambushed the village, the first time in the
people, stood beside the water. Women would Indian wars of the Northern Plains that the
have been at work tanning hides for tepees, military attacked a camp full of families. To-
moccasins, shirts and breeches, and drying and day the attack is often known, to the extent it Some 200
Sicangu Lakota
curing meat for the coming northern winter. is known at all, as the Blue Water Massacre, but were camped
Warriors would have seen to weapons and hors- for more than a century it was remembered in along Blue
Water Creek
es. Children would have been at their games. a few conventional histories as a particularly in what is now
Old men would have gathered around the fires ruthless U.S. military victory—the Army’s first western Nebras-
ka. Eighty-six
people were
killed, and many
others taken
prisoner.
D E N V E R P U B L I C L I B R A RY S P EC I A L C O L L ECT I O N S
A 19th-century
illustration of
the attack,
sometimes
known as the
Battle of Ash
Hollow, from a
biography of
Gen. William S.
Harney, who
led the U.S.
Army force.

major salvo in a 35-year campaign against the Lakota, lords of the North-
ern Plains, the people of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, which
SITE OF SORROW
The location of the former ended finally with their subjugation at Wounded Knee in 1890. That ep-
Lakota village is outside the isode, where as many as 300 Lakota were slaughtered, is widely known.
modern town of Lewellen.
Today it resides on private land. The same cannot be said about Blue Water.
A
The bloody chain of events had begun a year ear-
S
K lier, in mid-August 1854, when a lame-footed cow belonging to a Mormon
Lewellen A
B
R
Omaha
settler wandered into the camp of the Brulé, also known as the Sicangu,
E
N
Lincoln one of seven bands that make up the Lakota nation. There, along the North
Platte River in what is now Wyoming, the animal was felled by the arrow of
a warrior named High Forehead, who may have been hungry.
The Brulé Lakota chief, Conquering Bear, hurried to nearby Fort Lara-
ANATOMY OF A MASSACRE
Harney, below, with a beard, ambushed the vil- mie and offered the Mormon a horse from his own herd as restitution.
lage of Chief Little Thunder, below right, from two The matter might have ended there were it not for the ill-fated ambition
directions. The expedition’s mapmaker, Lt. G.K.
Warren, bottom, outlined the strategy in an 1856 of Lieutenant John Grattan, a 24-year-old Army officer a year out of West
topographic illustration. He also collected Lakota Point. Grattan was determined to personally arrest High Forehead and
belongings, from weapons to buffalo robes,
which he later donated to the Smithsonian. make his reputation in the process. On August 19, Grattan, with a drunken
interpreter and a detachment of 29 soldiers, be-
gan a ten-mile march to the Lakota camp. Fron-
tiersmen and other civilians they met along the
way pleaded with the lieutenant to reconsider, as
a small city of more than 4,000 Lakota had grown
up by the North Platte. “I don’t care how many
C O U RT ESY BA R RY L AW R E N C E R U D E R M A N A N T I Q U E M A P S, I N C. ; L I B R A RY O F C O N G R ES S (2 ); C O U RT ESY O F T H E L I T T L E T H U N D E R FA M I LY
there are,” Grattan told them. “With 30 men I can
whip all the Indians this side of the Missouri.”
When Grattan and his men marched into the vil-
lage, Conquering Bear tried to reason with him, but
the young officer made clear he would not leave
without his prisoner. “For all I tell you, you will
not hear me,” Conquering Bear finally said. “Today
you will meet something that will be very hard.”
Surrounded by hundreds of Lakota warriors, a
panicked U.S. Army soldier fired the first shot. Grat-
tan and all but one of his men were swiftly killed.
(The last soldier eventually succumbed to his inju-
ries.) Grattan’s body was riddled by 24 arrows. Con-
quering Bear, one of three Lakota who were wound-
ed, died from his injuries several days later.
News of the killings became an object of
national outrage, though in the months
to come congressional and Army re-
ports placed the blame for what hap-
pened squarely on Grattan. That No-
vember, three Brulé Lakota warriors,
later identified as Spotted Tail, Red
Leaf and Long Chin, close relatives of
the slain chief, attacked a mail coach
traveling near Fort Laramie, killing three
men, wounding a fourth, and reportedly making
off with thousands of dollars in gold, an act of re-
venge per Lakota custom.
By then, President Franklin Pierce and his secre-
tary of war, Jefferson Davis, had already endorsed
a retributive expedition of their own against the
Lakota. To lead it, Davis turned to Harney, an

old friend who had experience fighting Native Americans in “The bullet ripped her open for about six inches, a glancing
Florida and Wisconsin. In a White House meeting, Pierce gave shot. . . . Her bowels protruded from the wound as she fell.” To
Harney, a barrel-chested man with a long white beard, simple hide, Cokawin covered herself in tumbleweed and tore off a
orders. “Whip the Indians for us,” the president said. piece of her sleeve to use as a bandage. “There she lay all day
In August 1855, Harney and his men, equipped with new, listening to guns roar and to the hoofbeats of the horses, the
long-range Sharps rifles, set out from a frontier fort. “By shouting and yelling of the soldiers who came so near at times
God I am for battle,” Harney told a fur trapper as he depart- that she thought she would be discovered. Once in a while she
ed. “No peace!” By September 2, the troops were
camped along the North Platte near a place called
Ash Hollow, a popular stopping point for west- “His grandmother’s blood
ward-traveling emigrants on the Oregon Trail.
Harney learned that Chief Little Thunder, who dripped on him, but he
had succeeded Conquering Bear after his death,
was camped about six miles north by Blue Water
stayed still when he heard all
Creek, a tributary of the North Platte.
Before sunrise the next morning, the general
the hooeats, gunshots,
ordered a detachment of cavalry to skirt the vil- cries, shouts.”
lage and take up a position to the north. The rest
of the force would attack from the other direc-
tion, driving the Lakota villagers into the teeth of
the waiting soldiers. A separate, smaller village
of Oglala Lakota, camped along the creek three miles north could hear a Sioux war cry. At these times, Cokawin said she
of the Brulé, discovered the hidden cavalry, but by the time felt like singing and giving the trill.”
they did it was too late. Perhaps the most complete account of the massacre comes
As soon as the Brulé glimpsed Harney’s troops the women from the journal of a U.S. Army officer named Lieutenant
began to strike tepees, loading lodge poles, skins and other Gouverneur K. Warren. The 25-year-old West Point graduate
belongings onto travois, sledges drawn by horses and dogs. was a noncombatant, attached to Harney’s expedition as a
Seeing the people flee north, Harney feared his cavalry had mapmaker and topographer. Apparently appalled by the
insufficient time to set the ambush. To stall, he sent a guide brutality he witnessed, he devoted several diary pages to de-
to request a parley with Little Thunder. The chief quickly scribing the day’s horrors, particularly what he saw at bluff-
obliged, galloping toward the soldiers with two of his most side caves where many Lakota had sought safety. Soldiers,
renowned warriors, Spotted Tail and Iron Shell. According to giving chase, fired indiscriminately into the caves, a barrage
one account, Little Thunder approached Harney holding an that went on until the cries of a child were heard from inside.
umbrella as a makeshift white flag. Warren wrote:
The conversation took place over a distance of 30 to 40 feet.
Wounded women and children crying and moaning,
The general shouted his outrage for the killings of Grattan and
horribly mangled by the bullets . . . Two Indian
his soldiers and the murders of the three men in the mail coach
men were killed in the hole . . . Seven women were
robbery. “The day of retribution had come,” Harney said.
killed . . . and three children, two of them in their
Thirty minutes later, feeling delay was no longer necessary,
mothers’ arms. One young woman was wounded in
the general sent Little Thunder back to his people. He gave his
the left shoulder . . . Another handsome young squaw
soldiers the order to open fire, then took up a viewing position
was badly wounded just above her left knee and the
atop a nearby hill.
same ball wounded her baby in the right knee. . . .
I had a litter made and put her and her child upon
it. I found another girl of about 12 years lying with
What happened next was documented in her head down in a ravine and apparently dead.
Army after-action reports, in the private letters and journals of
Observing her breath, I had a man take her in his
American soldiers, and in interviews they gave late in their lives.
arms. She was shot through both feet. I found a little
There was also one recorded account from the perspective of a
boy shot through the calves of his legs and through
Lakota survivor, a woman named Cokawin who was in her 40s
his hams . . . He had enough strength left to hold me
at the time and gave her testimony many years later to another
round the neck.
Lakota woman named Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun. “The smoke
of the battle blinded her,” Bettelyoun wrote in her own memoir, Warren described his attempts to minister to the wound-
With My Own Eyes. “As she looked all around, she could see the ed and his distress at the sounds of a Lakota mother wailing
soldiers galloping after groups of old men, women and children for her dead baby. “The feeling of sympathy for the wound-
who were running for their lives. Some were running across the ed women and children and deep regret for their being so, I
valley only to be met by soldiers and shot right down.” found universal,” Warren wrote. “It could not be helped.”
As Cokawin tried to flee, a soldier shot her in the stomach. The Lakota passed down other stories from that day across

the generations. About the heroism of Spotted Tail ed by tall grass. He hid there and stayed there un-
Karen Little
and Iron Shell, for instance, who fought side by side Thunder, a til just before daylight, when it’s coldest and the
against the soldiers. Greatly outnumbered, Spotted great-great- dew forms. He emerged from there and started his
granddaughter
Tail was said to have killed several soldiers despite of the chief, who trek—200 miles north to Sicangu country—to take
being wounded himself by bullets and sabers. He with her cousin word of the massacre.”
Phil is leading
survived and managed to escape. efforts to When it was over, 86 Lakota had been killed,
The story of a dying grandmother and one little reclaim items many of them women and children. Four U.S. sol-
taken from the
boy—the son of the chief—became something of a massacre site. diers died. Harney confiscated tepees and buffa-
legend among the Brulé. In 2005, exactly 150 years For too long, lo meat for his expedition. The rest of the Lakota
she says, “the
later, that story was recounted near the site of the grief was just belongings were plundered or burned. Then the
massacre by the boy’s great-granddaughter, a Lako- shut down.” general marched 70 survivors, mostly women and
ta elder and activist named Rosalie Little Thunder. children, some 140 miles across the grasslands to
“His grandmother’s blood dripped on him, but he Fort Laramie. There he insisted that the perpetra-
stayed still when he heard all the hoofbeats, gun- tors of the mail coach attack surrender. If they did
shots, cries, shouts,” she said to a group of relatives not, Harney threatened to turn his captives over to
and others who had gathered for a commemora- the Pawnee, the Lakota’s mortal enemy.
tion. “He finally emerged after some silence. The That was why the warriors Spotted Tail, Long
Army spotted him and gave chase. He ran until he Chin and Red Leaf trotted on their horses into
got over a little hill and found a burrow surround- Fort Laramie a few weeks later. They were dressed

in their finest regalia and sang their 1864, when a U.S. military force attacked a Cheyenne and Arap-
death songs when they surrendered, aho camp near Sand Creek in Colorado, killing an estimated
expecting to die at the end of a wasi- 230 people, most of them women and children. In the violent
chu rope. Instead, they were taken years to come, government promises to the Plains Indians were
into custody and imprisoned at Fort made and quickly broken. The Lakota and their allies won sev-
Leavenworth in Kansas. The next eral military victories against the Army, most notably at the Lit-
year, at the urging of the region’s In- tle Bighorn, but as the years passed there was a sense of inevita-
dian agent, President Pierce pardoned bility, culminating with the slaughter at Wounded Knee, which
the Lakota warriors. extinguished the last embers of armed Lakota resistance.
The bloody episode had divergent im- Little Thunder died in 1879, having handed over leadership
pacts on the Lakota. For some leaders it of the Brulé to Spotted Tail in 1866, according to Douville. “He
was a radicalizing event, evidence that was shrewdly confident that his successor had the best qualifi-
the government could never be trust- cation of securing his unfulfilled goal of accomplishing peace.”
ed—that violent resistance was the only
path to meaningful tribal autonomy.
One such leader was Crazy Horse, who I first came across the story of the Blue Water
was a teenager in the Oglala village a few Massacre by accident, in early 2023, while researching a sep-
miles north of the Brulé camp, and who, arate historical project about the American West. In the bru-
coming upon the massacre site, saw tality of the violence and in the event’s bewildering obscurity,
firsthand its terrible aftermath. “Scat- it immediately reminded me of another event, the Tulsa Race
tered along the rocky slope were lodge Massacre of 1921, when hundreds of African Americans were
rolls, parfleches, robes, cradleboards killed by a white mob in that city’s Greenwood community.
and many other village goods, all tram- In 2001, I published a book about the Tulsa massacre, at a
pled and torn and burnt,” Crazy Horse’s time when few people apart from survivors or their descen-
biographer Mari Sandoz wrote in 1942, dants knew much about it. What happened in Tulsa, I learned,
“and among these lay dark places that was not a historical anomaly. Immersing myself in that history
were blood and darker ones that were not only inspired in me greater compassion for people from
the dead of his people.” The Lakota his- different backgrounds, with different histories, but also gave
torian Victor Douville has written that me a more fulsome understanding of the origins of our nation’s
the memory never left Crazy Horse, and racial and social fissures. By the time I returned to the subject
many say he thought of Blue Water while of the Tulsa massacre on its 100th anniversary for a story in
leading the rout of Lieutenant Colonel Smithsonian, the atrocity had become broadly known—and,
George Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876. perhaps not coincidentally, hopeful signs of racial reconcilia-
For other Lakota leaders, such as tion in Tulsa and elsewhere had begun to take hold.
Little Thunder and Spotted Tail, what Native American history has its own infamous gaps, but
they saw of the government’s cruelty in recent generations many difficult truths have bubbled to
and disproportionate fire-
power convinced them that
their people’s best, or perhaps only, chance for sur-
vival was negotiation and eventual peace. Spotted
“ These traumas just kept
Tail was sure the Lakota “could not win against the
power of the Americans,” his biographer George E.
happening and happening—
Hyde wrote. Spotted Tail would become the chief and we’re still grieving.
lieutenant and eventual successor of Little Thunder,
who was also wounded in the massacre but survived. That’s the way it is . . . for our
Sensing the ultimate futility of resistance, the two
men “prepared to lead their people down the path of
entire tribal people.”
peace and survival—a survival that included loss of
their independence, and a forced residence on res-
ervations,” the historian Paul N. Beck wrote in 2004.
In March 1856, Little Thunder was forced to shake hands the surface of the nation’s cultural awareness. Dee Brown’s
with Harney, who had summoned leaders of the seven Lakota 1970 landmark best seller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,
bands to Fort Pierre, in South Dakota, to dictate his terms for revealed for a broad audience the sanitized nature of main-
peace—essentially, obedience and docility. In return, Harney stream Indigenous history. (Even still, the events at Blue Water
released the prisoners he had taken at Blue Water. received a single sentence.) The American Indian Movement,
A period of relative quietude between the Lakota, some of which flourished around the same time, fought publicly and
their Native allies and the U.S. government ended in November militantly for unfulfilled treaty rights and the reclamation of

tribal lands. In more recent decades, scholars, writers, film- tral South Dakota, which has been a home for the Sicangu Oyate,
makers, artists, activists, political leaders and others, Native as the Brulé now call themselves, since 1889. (Both the Lakota
and non-Native, have filled in the picture more completely. and French terms refer to “burnt thigh people,” a name appar-
They have highlighted the relatively overlooked history of the ently deriving from a terrible prairie fire long ago.) The reserva-
enslavement of Native Americans, for example, or challenged tion sprawls across more than 900,000 acres of grasslands, roll-
simplistic narratives about American colonial expansion to ing hills and pine forests, and is dotted by small towns, smaller
focus on the ways Indigenous people helped shape this coun- villages, and many ranches and farms. I met with Lakota resi-
try’s borders, history and culture. dents carrying surnames like Little Thunder and Spotted Tail
Some of this work has broken through into popular culture. and with descendants of Iron Shell. They told me about their
In just the past decade, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower lives, introduced me to their songs, drums and prayers, and
Moon, adapted into a movie by Martin Scorsese, publicized spoke about the importance of venerating their ancestors and
the true story of the Osage Nation’s extraordinary wealth after keeping their ancient rituals and ceremonies. Not everybody
oil was found beneath tribal land—and the string of murders was forthcoming. At one dinner, a Lakota elder named Phil
by white settlers intent on stealing that wealth. The Ken Burns Two Eagle, the executive director of Rosebud’s Sicangu Lakota
documentary The American Buffalo traced how deliberate U.S. Treaty Council, asked me succinctly: “Why are you here?” My
policy all but eradicated the once abundant animal, with di- answer had to do with an acquired belief that cultural healing
sastrous effects on the Plains Indians. The theme was explored is not possible without a full and honest accounting of the past.
by the Ojibwe writer David Treuer in his 2019 counter-history, The past and its sometimes grim legacies were evident at
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee:
Native America From 1890 to the
Present. Without the buffalo, he
wrote, the Plains tribes had little
choice but to move onto reserva-
tions. “The reservations might
have been designed as prisons,
but now they became places of
refuge.” In 2021, the Chippe-
wa novelist Louise Erdrich was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The
Night Watchman, set on the Tur-
tle Mountain Reservation in the
1950s, the latest of her celebrated
books to draw from the realities
of Native life and history. And the
FX television series “Reservation
Dogs” brought American viewers
onto a reservation in the present
day, following the sometimes
comic, sometimes tragic travails
of young Native Americans plot-
ting their escape from reserva-
tion life for what they imagine is
something better.
The U.S. government, mean-
while, under the direction of In- Rosebud. About one-third of the Sicangu’s 30,000
terior Secretary Deb Haaland, the Paul Soderman, a distant relative or so enrolled members live on the reservation.
of Gen. Harney, has become a con-
first Native cabinet secretary in fidant of the Little Thunder family Of those, more than half live below the pover-
and an advocate for atonement and ty line. The life expectancy is a decade less than
U.S. history, has opened a federal reconciliation. “What happened at
investigation into the historical Blue Water was terrorism,” he says. the national average, suicide rates dwarf national
abuses of the Indian boarding figures, and substance abuse is an epidemic. And
school system. Haaland convened listening sessions across the yet, for many residents, leaving the reservation is close to
country. She opened each session this way: “My ancestors en- unimaginable. “It’s hard for any of us to leave, because we’re
dured the horrors of the Indian boarding school assimilation just real social beings, and we’re grounded here with all of
policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.” our family,” Gale Spotted Tail, Rosebud’s program director of
In September 2023, in an effort to learn more about the child care services and the great-great-granddaughter of the
massacre at Blue Water and its persistent impacts, I made the chief, told me. “We don’t look through the eyes of being im-
first of two long trips to the Rosebud Reservation, in south-cen- poverished. We look more at the values you have as a person.

private effort has, in recent years and months, grown
into a more expansive and even urgent movement.
The first time I spoke with Karen Little Thun-
der, a great-great-granddaughter of the chief and
the younger sister of Rosalie, who died in 2014, she
explained that she saw in this effort a way to move
beyond the interminable stasis of injustice. “They
attacked in very early morning and just slaughtered
us, and there was no time for anything except to sur-
vive,” she said. “Then the village was burned. Then
the survivors were marched away to one of the forts
and the women and children were taken
and used as pawns. These traumas just kept
happening and happening—and we’re still
grieving. That’s the way it is, not just for Lit-
tle Thunder relatives, but for our entire trib-
al people. We could not do anything except
survive back then. Fast-forward 150 years,
we’re still in survival mode.”
Karen Little Thunder,

today a mother and grandmother at age 59,
lives on the Rosebud Reservation in a white
double-wide trailer on land that has been
in her family for generations. She doesn’t
remember hearing about Blue Water until
her early 20s, when her father handed her
a few photocopied pages from a book that
described the massacre. At the time, as she
struggled with alcohol addiction, the sig-
nificance of what she read didn’t register.
In 2004, after several years of sobriety,
she enrolled at the tribal university, where
a fellow student told her that a professor
named Peter Gibbs was talking about the
Little Thunder family in his lectures. One
day, Karen Little Thunder ran into Gibbs
in the school’s Lakota studies building.
“We stood in the hallway for 10 or 15 min-
utes,” she recalled. The topic of his lec-
tures had been the Blue Water Massacre.
“He told me in a nutshell what he was
talking about in his class. I remember go-
We still have that kind of connection.” I learned ing through the rest of my day, like—mind blown. I
An 1873 letter
written by that many Lakota weren’t aware of the history of needed to do something with all this information. I
Joseph Henry, the Blue Water Massacre or didn’t feel it was par- took as many classes as I could in the Lakota studies
the Smithso-
nian’s founding ticularly relevant to their lives. Most are simply too department, and in doing so was able to do my own
S M I T H S O N I A N I N ST I T U T I O N A R C H I V ES
Secretary, to preoccupied with the realities of getting by, Gale research about the massacre.”
Gen. William
Sherman seems Spotted Tail told me. By chance, weeks later Karen Little Thunder re-
to confirm that But I found that some did remember. And I ceived a letter from two sisters, Jean Jensen and
Lakota objects
held in the learned that, in addition to recovering the story of Dianne Greenwald, who had grown up close to the
Institution’s the Blue Water Massacre, there was a second, parallel Nebraska massacre site. As children they hunted for
collection came
from the site. story waiting to be told. It was about a small, unlikely arrowheads while playing along Blue Water Creek.
group of people who had taken it upon themselves They had heard a battle had happened there but had
to reckon with this historical tragedy and find a path only a vague sense of what that was. They finally
toward some form of reconciliation. What began as a learned about the atrocity as adults, after reading

books about state and local history
and talking to history buffs. Now they
were writing blindly to any member of
the Little Thunder family whose con-
tact information they could find. With
family members and local friends, the
sisters decided to include the massa-
cre in an event commemorating local
history. In years past, the event usually
focused on white pioneers on the Or-
egon Trail who traveled through that
part of Nebraska. It was time, Jensen
told me, “to tell the Lakota side of the
story, to make it known.”
About 40 other members of the Lit-
tle Thunder family accepted an invita-
tion to attend, including Karen and her
first cousin Phil Little Thunder, also a
great-great-grandchild of the chief.
Like Karen, Phil had struggled with
addiction, and had turned to the cus-
toms and ceremonies of the Lakota as
part of his recovery. Together everyone
made the roughly four-hour drive from
the reservation to a grassy field near
Blue Water Creek, where tents were
pitched and two sweat lodges built for
prayer ceremonies—the first but not
the last time many of the descendants
returned to the site.
Not long afterward, Karen came across a photo- morse and embarrassment for having looted the pos-
The Lakota
graph on the internet—a tiny doll, taken from the spiritual leader sessions of a vanquished foe, even though his motives
massacre site. She was haunted by the image. As a Basil Brave Heart were entirely for the good of science,” Hanson wrote.
led a successful
child, she’d learned that, where her ancestors were effort to rename But the items made up “one of the most significant
concerned, moccasins were never just moccasins, Harney Peak, in Plains Indians collections ever made,” Hanson noted,
South Dakota.
buckskin pants and feather bonnets and war shirts He supports including “dozens of pony-beaded articles of cloth-
were more than mere physical objects. “My uncle Al- the return of ing—dresses, leggings, a war shirt, a headdress, baby
the Blue Water
bert White Hat used to talk about how the essence of items, advocat- carriers and moccasins, as well as quilled robes, trade
the person becomes attached to their belongings,” she ing “forgiveness.” blankets, tepee bags, pipes, a bow case, a complete set
said. “They are almost like living things themselves.” of horse gear, a knife sheath, children’s toys including
And she eventually learned that the doll was hard- the earliest known Plains Indian doll.”
ly the only object plundered that day. Gouverneur K. When I spoke with Hanson recently, he said he
Warren, the young officer who recorded his horror had come upon the objects by accident, as a gradu-
at the massacre, had apparently collected dozens ate student in the early 1970s researching Sioux trade
of Lakota belongings from the site. Karen found a artifacts. Flipping through the card catalog in the an-
semi-obscure book called Little Chief’s Gatherings, thropology department of the National Museum of
written by a historian of the frontier named James BYLINES Natural History, he recognized Warren’s name from
A. Hanson, which had been published in 1996. (The books and western atlases he read as a boy. “Here’s a
Tim Madigan
name “Little Chief” derived from a dismissive La- last wrote for whole section of the real early stuff”—Native Ameri-
kota nickname for Warren, a reference to his short Smithsonian can artifacts—“that says, ‘Collected by G.K. Warren,’”
about recovering
stature.) Hanson described how Warren transported the history of the Hanson told me. “I said, ‘My God, this is something I
1921 Tulsa Race
the Lakota belongings to the East Coast and, the next Massacre. would love to research.’” Hanson tracked down War-
year, in 1856, quietly donated them, more than 60 ren artifacts that had been scattered among hundreds
Jaida Grey
items, to the Smithsonian, then a fledgling cultural Eagle is an of thousands of other items in storage throughout
Oglala Lakota
institution in the nation’s capital. documentary the museum. He learned that about 20 of the Warren
Warren never spoke or wrote publicly about his photographer items had once been on display, labeled as “examples
based in St. Paul,
contribution to the museum. “I believe he felt re- Minnesota. of Lakota life in the 1850s.” But other than the musty

references in the card catalog, there President Lincoln himself entered the East Room and greeted
was no other written record of the Stover’s father by name. It turned out the two men had prac-
collection or its provenance. ticed law together in Illinois years before. “The tall president
When Hanson’s book was pub- who was 6 feet 4 and a half inches, stooped down and shook
lished, it included a formal descrip- hands with me,” Stover wrote. During the visit, it came up that
tion of the massacre, a transcript of Stover’s mother’s maiden name was Harney. In fact, Stover’s
Warren’s diary and 58 photographs, mother told Lincoln, she was the cousin of an Army general
many in color, of Lakota belong- named William S. Harney. “And the president said, ‘Well, he is
ings. The most heartrending image my general in St. Louis, and he and I were in the Black Hawk
was the child’s doll. Fashioned from War together,’” Stover wrote.
tanned animal hide, with seeds for Soderman, then 40 years old, was stunned. A profession-
eyes and flowing locks made from al blues singer from Princeton, New Jersey, and later a sub-
black horsehair, it wore tiny moc- stance abuse counselor, he’d moved to Boulder, Colorado,
casins and a blue wool cloth dress. years earlier, drawn to the city for its thriving music scene.
In 2010, Karen Little Thunder con- There he also made Native American friends and deepened
tacted the museum and was granted an interest in Native spiritual practices. By 1999, Soderman
permission to come see the items in knew many Lakota people. He had heard of the Blue Water
person. The museum’s storage facil- Massacre. He knew that the tallest mountain in South Dako-
ity was located in a Virginia suburb ta’s Black Hills, the spiritual home of the Lakota, was named
of the nation’s capital. She and her Harney Peak. And now, in the unlikeliest of ways—through
then husband, Clayton Wright Jr., a letter written by his great-great-grandfather describing a
passed through security and were meeting with Abraham Lincoln—Soderman learned that he
met by a museum official named and Harney were distant relatives. “I felt a responsibility right
Bill Billeck. “When we started going away,” Soderman told me recently. “I’d already been with the
down to where the items are actually Lakota people for a long time. They had already told me how
stored, that’s where it became dark,” these things affected them. I tried to make sense of all this,
she remembered. “The storage cab- and little by little I kept moving forward.”
inets were like those red toolboxes During the next several years, he immersed himself in
with shallow drawers. I’m wearing Lakota culture, history and language. By chance, he met
these little cloth gloves.
We were able to go through and find and view and
hold several items.” A number of the belongings
appeared to be stained with blood. “It was good
“ ‘Why are you digging up the
until we came upon what looked like a baby blan- past? That happened 160 years
ket, a wrap made out of buffalo hide. You could
see a little hood for the child’s head. When I put
ago.’ For Phil, it might as well
my hand on that little baby wrap, that’s when it
hit me really hard. I could see, I could feel, I could
have happened last week.
imagine a child in that wrap. I mean, it just hit me That’s how connected they are.”
so hard. This is real. This is what happened. There
was a baby in this blanket. I had to turn around
and walk away. I just felt like screaming and cry-
ing and beating on somebody. It made me angry
and sad at the same time.” another Boulder-area resident, a prominent jazz trumpet-
She composed herself and returned to the belongings. After- er named Brad Upton, who shared Soderman’s commit-
ward, she felt affirmed. The experience was a sign “that I’m fol- ment to atonement. Upton was haunted by the fact that his
lowing the right path,” she said. “It’s like when I hear a coyote or great-great-grandfather, Colonel James W. Forsyth, had com-
I see a beautiful eagle. Those things are answers as well.” manded the troops at Wounded Knee.
Soderman first connected with Karen Little Thunder on
an internet message board, and he met her in person in
In 1999, Paul Soderman and his family were sorting 2014. A short time later, Karen told her cousin, Phil, that a
through the belongings of a recently deceased aunt at her relative of Harney wanted to meet him. Phil Little Thunder,
home on Long Island, New York, when they came across a short, soft-spoken man, saw it as an opportunity to “count
a remarkable letter. The letter was written by Soderman’s coup” on an enemy, the ancient Native practice of getting
great-great-grandfather, James Harney Stover, in 1934, when close enough to touch an adversary. Phil remembers think-
he was in his 80s. In it, he told the story of visiting the White ing, “I’m going to shake his hand, and hold it real tight—and
House with his family in April 1861, when he was 12 years old. then I’m going to give him a left hook, because his ancestor

did my people that way.” Then they met. “When I The women sought and received the blessing of
shook hands with him, instead of whupping him, Basil Brave Heart, who felt that returning the items
he hugged me.” to Nebraska would foster healing among both white
Around that time, a Lakota elder and spiritual Americans and Native people. “Is it possible that
leader named Basil Brave Heart was leading a cam- when everyone vibrates with complete forgiveness,
paign to rename Harney Peak. As a seventh-gen- that all of a sudden all of this division will shift?”
eration descendant of Harney, Soderman publicly Brave Heart said, in a testimony recorded for Smith-
endorsed the effort. In August 2016, the U.S. Board sonian officials. “Absolutely.”
on Geographic Names announced the Harney name After the women presented the plan to a large
group of Little Thunder relatives, who endorsed
the idea, the Smithsonian approved the loan of
The Lakota lead-
er Spotted Tail, seven items from the Warren collection (deemed
photographed by curators as in the best condition to travel) for a
in the 1880s. A
renowned war- three-day exhibition at the visitor center of the Ash
rior hailed for his Hollow State Historical Park. The center commem-
heroism at Blue
Water, as chief orates Ash Hollow’s significance to pioneers on the
he became a top Oregon Trail, but it also sits atop a bluff overlooking
proponent of
peace with the Blue Water Creek and the valley where the massacre
U.S. government. occurred.
The belongings were flown to Denver and driven to
Nebraska, arriving at Ash Hollow late on a Wednesday
afternoon in July 2017. Phil Little Thunder told me
that he felt a sadness and a restlessness, like a caged
wolf, when he first saw the belongings, which includ-
ed the doll from Hanson’s book, plus a ceremonial
rattle, a decorated saddle, a bag of porcupine quills,
a bow, an ammunition pouch and a powder horn. But
he couldn’t help but think about the rest of the items,
which remained in vaults on the East Coast. “It was
like a halfway apology,” he said.
In mourning over the items, he had let out a
plaintive cry. “I’ll never forget the sound,” Soder-
man told me. “He’s done it a few times at the Wit-
ness Tree. That’s the connection between now and
D E N V E R P U B L I C L I B R A RY S P EC I A L C O L L ECT I O N S ; N AT I O N A L A N T H R O P O LO G I CA L A R C H I V ES, S I
would be removed, and the landmark would hence-
forth be known as Black Elk Peak, for the legendary Chief Little
Thunder’s son,
Lakota warrior and holy man. “The initial emphasis known as Little
was to get Harney Peak changed,” Soderman recalled. Thunder Jr., in
an 1867 pho-
“When that was done, we started thinking, in collab- tograph that is
often mistaken
oration with Karen and Phil, ‘What can we do now?’” for showing the
chief himself.
As a boy, he
survived the
Not long afterward, the Little massacre; his
grandmother
Thunders and their Nebraska friends gathered be- did not.
neath the Witness Tree for a healing ceremony.
When it was finished, Karen Little Thunder was
approached by Shelie Hartman-Gibbs (no relation
to Peter Gibbs), who had grown up near the Blue
Water and remained active in historical commem-
oration there. The 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s
statehood was approaching. Hartman-Gibbs and her
sister had the idea of bringing part of the Warren col-
lection back to Nebraska for a temporary exhibition.
What did Karen think? “I only remember the over-
whelming feeling that this was another piece of the
puzzle,” Karen says.

Afterward, Karen and Phil Little Thunder
and another cousin, Harry Little Thunder,
together with Soderman, began to discuss
the possibility of getting the entire Warren
collection returned to the Lakota for good.
The timing for such an appeal

felt right. Cultural institutions around the
world have been reckoning, sometimes
publicly, with the fact that many of their
holdings were collected in ways that we now
consider unethical. In the United States,
federal agencies and many museums and
institutions are already mandated by law
to repatriate requested Native American
human remains, burial artifacts and sacred
objects held in their collections. The War-
ren collection objects don’t fall under these
categories, but the Smithsonian has recent-
ly enacted a broader, Institution-wide pol-
icy called Shared Stewardship and Ethical
Returns. Under the policy, which went into
effect in 2022, artifacts of everyday life that
Native groups deem of cultural importance
may qualify to be returned. In certain cas-
es, shared stewardship agreements allow
the Institution to care for the items at the
request of the original owners.
I spoke recently with Kevin Gover, the
Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for muse-
ums and culture and a member of the Paw-
nee nation of Oklahoma, who served for 14
years as director of the National Museum
of the American Indian. He was forthright
then, the sound of his grief. It’s real. That’s what about how much the Institution’s perspective has
A sapling from
I try to explain to my family and others who ask, the Witness Tree evolved. “Even if we have legal title for a given ar-
‘Why are you digging up the past? That happened that Phil Little tifact, if it was acquired unethically, whether by us
Thunder planted
160 years ago.’ For Phil, it might as well have hap- in his yard on or whoever it was that acquired it originally, then we
pened last week. That’s how connected they are.” the Rosebud should give it back,” he said. He cited the Smithso-
Reservation in
That night, a Lakota medicine man performed a South Dakota. nian’s recent return to Nigeria of 29 “Benin Bronzes”
healing ceremony in the part of the visitor center plundered by the British during an attack in 1897. “In
where the belongings would be displayed. “I can’t our parlance, that was unethically acquired. That’s
describe what actually happened,” Karen Little why we were not just willing but anxious to return
Thunder told a reporter for the Lakota Times. “But those to Nigeria. I think the same would apply here,”
when I first came out of the ceremony I was numb. he said, referring to the Warren collection. “If these
We all gathered for a meal, and I spoke to my cous- artifacts were from a battlefield, even worse from a
in—my brother—Phil. He said, ‘The ancestors are massacre, clearly they were unethically acquired,
happy.’ And I felt that, too. The spirits of our ances- not necessarily by us, but by the U.S. Army and given
tors joined us in the ceremony and they were wel- to us. We have an obligation to return them.”
comed home.” In August, the Little Thunder group formally ap-
Karen Little Thunder spent the night in her van at plied under the new policy for the return of 69 items
the massacre site. “And I woke up the next morning they believe came from the massacre site. Sarah Lou-
and was just so happy,” she told the Lakota Times. din, the National Museum of Natural History’s head
“I could have been dancing by myself. I felt happy. registrar, told me that the process for reviewing the
I felt laughter. I felt peaceful. That told me things application will take time. As the museum gathers in-
were good.” formation, it will consider questions of standing, in-

cluding, for example, whether the ap-
plicants are lineal descendants of the
original owners of the belongings; are
official representatives of the commu-
nity where the items originated or are
acting on its behalf; and whether there
are competing requests for the objects.
Another critical issue will be demon-
strating provenance—whether the
items can be shown definitively to have
come from the Blue Water Massacre.
Hanson, in Little Chief’s Gatherings,
pieced together impressive circumstan-
tial evidence that the Warren collection
had come from the massacre, but he
had “no smoking gun,” Billeck, a for-
mer Smithsonian repatriation manager,
told me. That changed last year, Billeck
says, after he unearthed an obscure let-
ter in the Institution’s archives that he
described to me as “the first evidence
we have.” The letter was written in 1873
by Smithsonian founding Secretary Jo-
seph Henry to General William T. Sher-
man, the Civil War hero who was then
head of the Army. At the time, Sherman
commanded U.S. troops engaged in on-
going hostilities against Native tribes.
Henry was asking Sherman to order
soldiers to “embrace any opportunity
that may be presented in the course of
service to secure and transmit to Wash-
ington specimens illustrating Indian
life and warfare.” As an example, Hen-
ry cited Warren’s actions at Blue Water,
in which the officer had secured a large
assortment of Lakota belongings “from
the bodies of the slain.”
Billeck shared Henry’s letter by
email with Karen Little Thunder and
Paul Soderman, writing that the letter made clear that “Warren Harry, and Paul Soderman have been busy gathering support
obtained the objects at the Smithsonian and that they are from back home. They found an ally in Phil Two Eagle, the Sicangu
Ash Hollow or Blue Water Creek.” The Little Thunders included treaty council executive director, who last December placed the
the letter as a part of their application to the Smithsonian. Blue Water Massacre on the agenda for the annual conference
The formal request is one step in an ongoing process of of treaty councils from all seven Lakota bands.
considerable cultural and spiritual complexity. For example, In a hotel ballroom in Rapid City, South Dakota, the Lit-
in the past, some Little Thunder family members expressed tle Thunders and Soderman appeared before the conference
reservations about reclaiming the items, arguing that other and spoke about what happened in 1855. Afterward, the el-
Sicangu families descended from massacre survivors should ders stood and, singing an old Lakota honor song, shook
be involved. There is also a question about what the Sicangu their hands.
would do with the items if they are returned. Some Lakota el- The next day, Phil Little Thunder read a resolution that Phil
ders would likely advocate ritual burning, per tradition, while Two Eagle had helped draft. In the name of the Sicangu Oyate
others favor keeping them for educational and ceremonial and the Blue Water families, it called not only for the return of
purposes. That raises other practical considerations, such as the Warren collection, but also for a geophysical survey of the
where the Lakota would store the items and how they would massacre site to identify and recover any remains of victims, and
pay for any associated costs. for the establishment of a memorial and interpretative center at
In recent months, Karen Little Thunder, her cousins Phil and the site. The resolution, while nonbinding, was unanimously en-

Now we’re trying to get somebody to make it right.”
Recently, the Rosebud Sicangu’s historic preser-
vation office, along with representatives of the Little
Thunder family, have been in discussions with Ne-
braska state officials about storing the items, should
they be returned, at the Ash Hollow visitor center.
Under the proposed agreement, the visitor center
would host the items in a secure and managed en-
vironment for at least two years while the Sicangu
work to decide on their final disposition. During that
time, according to the proposal, descendants of mas-
sacre survivors and other Sicangu tribal members
would have the right to privately view the collection.
Gover, when I spoke with him, recalled attending
ceremonies as director of the National Museum of
the American Indian when belongings were returned
to their original owners. “People would just weep,” he
said. “That made it a powerful experience for us as
well. It’s not even making amends. In the Native view
of the universe, that is a step toward restoring bal-
ance, just putting things right to return those things
to the community where they originated. There is
real power in that. There are a lot of these incidents
from history that still need to be put right.”
The Blue Water valley has been

in private hands for generations. Today it includes a
patchwork of different owners, not all of them sym-
pathetic to the Lakota or an organized effort to re-
member the massacre. A Nebraska rancher named
Pat Gamet, who is 56, is an exception. He owns the
acreage surrounding the Witness Tree and the area
where the Lakota village once stood. He says he has
kept the land as it was to protect it for the Lakota
people and help honor their history there. “That’s
my role in all of this. It’s a very humble one.”
On that hot afternoon last year, the 168th anniver-
sary of the massacre, about 30 people gathered under
the Witness Tree with the Little Thunders. Gamet was
dorsed by representatives of the seven Lakota bands. there, and the sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Green-
Blue Water
Gale Spotted Tail, the descendant of the Sicangu Creek viewed wald, and their families. In the healing circle, Soder-
chief, has become another important supporter. “I’m from Ash Hollow man and his wife, Cathie, who were ceremonially ad-
State Histori-
in favor of it, because it will bring attention to the cal Park. The opted into the Little Thunder family a few years ago,
Blue Water,” she told me. “A lot of people don’t know park’s visitor stood side by side with Brad Upton, all of them singing
center may store
about it. Healing ceremonies would come with those the artifacts ancient Lakota healing songs. The echoes from Phil
belongings being returned. That kind of spiritual should they be Little Thunder’s drum were carried off by the wind.
returned. Smith-
power will help our souls. It’s an opportunity for kids sonian opted Karen Little Thunder spoke up. “I would just like to
here to know their identity.” not to include say thank you to everybody for being here, for being
photographs
Ione Quigley, a Sicangu elder and Rosebud’s histor- of the Lakota here for us, for all of us,” she said. “You’re helping us
ic preservation officer, has also enthusiastically en- belongings out to lighten this heavy load that we carry.”
of respect for
dorsed the collection’s return. “If you took my grand- Sicangu The scene called to mind a favorite phrase of Ba-
ma’s dress right off her body, I will still carry that,” she descendants. sil Brave Heart, the Lakota spiritual leader, that has
said. “And my child will still carry that, and on and on. become a mantra of sorts for the people beneath the
But instead of holding on to being a victim, we decided Witness Tree.
to stand up and take control and do something about Taku wakan skan skan, the saying went. “Some-
it. People will take notice that this has happened. thing sacred is in motion.”

From fi sh smoothies to oral antibiotics, researchers are taking matters into their own
hands in a radical effort to save New Zealand’s yellow-eyed penguins
MANY PENGUIN SPECIES HUDDLE together in massive The decline stems from a litany of factors. Red cod,
colonies, but pairs of yellow-eyed penguins go out of once a pillar of the hoiho diet, has become scarce, and
their way to be alone, nesting deep in New Zealand’s blue cod, although larger, are harder to catch, eat and
scrublands and forests out of sight of other penguins. feed to their chicks than other staple fish. Penguins also
When pairs reunite at the nest after one has been away drown each year in commercial gillnets. And a pair of
fishing, they greet each other with a piercing cry that diseases, avian diphtheria and, since 2019, a mysterious
Thor Elley, an endangered avian species researcher and fatal respiratory illness, also infect virtually every
at the University of Otago with Māori roots, likens to chick. Janelle Wierenga, a veterinary scientist at
“a whistling tea kettle rolling down a hill.” The species’ the University of Otago and Massey University, says
Māori name, hoiho, roughly translates to “noise shouter.” potential vaccines and drugs are likely years away.
Screaming and antisocial behavior may not seem To keep the species afloat, wildlife hospitals and
like beloved traits, but these penguins are revered in conservation groups have taken the radical step of
Māori culture as taonga, or treasure, even gracing the removing every single hoiho chick on the South Island
country’s $5 bill. They are “protected by from its nest and placing it in human care for its first
photograph by sacred origins,” Elley says. week or so of life. Chicks are treated with antibiotics
Tim Laman But one of New Zealand’s to heal the mouth sores caused by avian diphtheria.
favorite endemic birds is also one They’re also fed fish smoothies to boost their strength.
of its rarest. The International Union for Conservation It’s unclear how, but this extra care prevents chicks
of Nature estimates that only between 2,600 and 3,000 from developing the respiratory disease. “I’ve got the
hoiho exist. About a third live on New Zealand’s South feeling that the diseases are a secondary problem, and
Island and nearby Stewart Island. The rest inhabit sub- the primary problem is the penguins don’t get the
Antarctic islands some 300 miles to the south. In the sustenance they need,” says Thomas Mattern, an
past 15 years, the northern population has plummeted ecologist at the University of Otago.
by roughly 75 percent, and researchers expect that In 2023, the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital
group could disappear within the next two decades if hand-reared 214 hoiho chicks. Without
the trend continues. human intervention, 50 to 70 percent of
those chicks would have died, Lisa Argilla,
the hospital’s senior wildlife veterinarian
and director, estimates. But these herculean
efforts can only offer a short-term reprieve.
“We are trying to buy this population as
much time as we can,” she says. “You feel
like you’re fighting a losing battle, but we couldn’t
live with ourselves if we didn’t fight for these
penguins.” –ALEX FOX
54 SMITHSONIAN | Monthtk
November0000
2024
HEROES
OF THE
WILD
After female penguins

lay eggs, parents
take turns warming
the nest during the
roughly 43-day incu-
bation period.
N A N E V E N I N G I N M AY 1 9 3 4 , a crowd
filed into an auditorium in the port
city of Szczecin, now in northwestern
Poland. The city was then known as
Stettin, and it was the capital of the state of Pomerania in
Nazi Germany. The audience hunted for their seats beneath
the chandelier. The houselights of the Stadttheater dimmed
and the curtains opened to Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
The title role of Hedda, Ibsen’s tragic antiheroine, was
played by Agnes Straub, the celebrated leader of the tour-
ing ensemble that bore her name. Throughout the first act,
the auditorium was hushed. But when the actor playing
Judge Brack, the play’s lustful old bachelor, emerged from
the wings with his walking stick, eyeglass and thick mus-
tache, the house erupted in jeers and boos.
The actor playing Brack was Leo Reuss, the cast’s sole
Jewish member, a handsome man with a sculpted jaw and
dark eyes. Like Straub, Reuss was a familiar presence on
the German stage. They were both regulars in the cabarets
and leftist theaters of Weimar-era Berlin, and they had
been romantically entwined since the
1920s. Now they were on the road with
Straub’s company, captivating critics Leo Reuss
rehearses with
and packing out provincial theaters. celebrated stage
But Germany was darkening rapidly. actress Christl
Mardayn in 1937.
Hitler had seized power a year earlier, Reuss’ bleached
hair and beard
and culture was central to his mission. were remnants
Without Nazi-approved art, Hitler ar- of his false iden-
tity as a farmer.
gued in the forward to the program
for the Stettin theater’s 1933-4 season,
Germans would lose “the better part of their blood. Their
downfall will only be a matter of time.” The Stormtroop-
ers, or Sturmabteilung, probably organized the antisemitic
hecklers that evening. Interrupting Jewish performers had
been a tactic of theirs since the 1920s, and two months ear-
lier, the Stormtroopers’ cultural office had issued a diktat
to its members warning them about certain theaters. The

The
of
AFTER THE NAZIS

FORCED LEO REU S S
O F F T H E G E R M A N S TA G E
I N 19 34, T H E J E W I S H AC T O R
F O U N D A DA R I N G WAY TO
HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT
T H E AT R E M U S E U M , V I E N N A ; A L A M Y
by T o m a s W e b e r

list had also specified certain performers, including kicked out of school for attempting to recruit the son
“the Jew Leo Reuss.” of a powerful conservative functionary. After seeing
The cast staggered through the heckles to com- Josef Kainz, one of Vienna’s most successful stars,
plete the four acts of Ibsen’s tragedy. But in the days onstage at the Burgtheater, Reuss felt compelled to
afterward, Straub received messages from the next become an actor. His father offered him money to go
theaters on the tour: “Is Leo Reuss Aryan?” the direc- to medical school, but Reuss used that money to en-
tor of a theater in Zoppot, today’s Sopot in Poland, roll in the University of Music and Performing Arts.
wrote in a telegram before a forthcoming show, “If When his father found out, he turned Reuss out of
not, we will request another actor.” From then on, the house. The boy moved into a hut at a community
Reuss agreed to work backstage. garden and survived on stolen vegetables.
In September 1935, the Nazi government passed After graduating from theater school, Reuss was
the Nuremberg Race Laws, a set of legal decrees
that outlawed sex or marriage between Jewish and
non-Jewish Germans, forbade Jewish households to
employ non-Jewish women under 45, and declared
that only Germans of “Aryan” blood could be Third
Reich citizens. Reuss and Straub’s relationship had
become illegal. He soon left Germany for Vienna.
Less than three years later, in March 1938, Germa-
ny annexed Austria, and the situation for Jews there
became dire. When Reuss arrived, however, in late
1935, Vienna still had a vibrant Jewish community
free from the racist Nuremberg Laws. Ten percent of
the city’s residents were Jewish, and they were espe-
cially prominent in the arts.
The problem for Reuss was that Austria’s ruling
nationalist party didn’t consider him Austrian. Al-
though he’d grown up in Vienna, his birthplace was
Galicia—a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire A MAN OF
MANY ROLES
that was absorbed into Poland after World War I.
Top, Reuss
Austria now deemed Reuss stateless, which meant (right) plays
he had no right to work in Vienna. So Reuss decided Napoleon in his
final European
to hide in plain sight. performance in
Aware that his years on the stage would make him 1937. Bottom,
Reuss (pointing,
easy to recognize, he used all his training to trans- right) in his
younger years in
form himself, from the color of his hair to his dialect, 1925, performing
and he continued auditioning for roles. By becoming in Berlin with
his longtime
the sort of person antisemites tended to idealize, he romantic partner
would force his audience to confront the absurdity Agnes Straub
and Friedrich
of the racial ideology that was on the verge of de- Kayssler, seated.
stroying Europe.
R E U S S WAS B O R N O N M A R C H 3 0, 189 1, to Ernes-

AU ST R I A N N AT I O N A L L I B R A RY ( 3); A KG I M AG ES
tine and Samuel, a veterinarian, in the small town

of Dolina in Galicia, today in western Ukraine. His
original name was Mauriz Leon Reiss—which he
would later change to Reuss, a less identifiably Jew-
ish name. When Reuss was a small child, his family
moved from Dolina to Vienna along with hundreds
of thousands of other immigrants from the empire’s
distant outposts, all landing in the imperial metrop-
olis as the 19th century came to a close.
The teenage Reuss became the leader of an em-
pire-wide socialist youth organization and was

conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and BECOMING “His face is pale because he cannot sleep,” wrote
BRANDHOFER
sent to fight in the First World War. In the Battle of Left, a portrait
the author of a profile of Reuss in a publication pro-
Galicia, he took Russian rifle fire and won a medal of the artist as duced by the Volksbühne, a prominent theater in
a young, openly
for bravery. During a brief period of leave, he mar- Jewish man. Berlin. “His voice is hoarse from so much talking.”
ried Stefanie Magdziarz, the daughter of a Viennese Right, Reuss af- He met Straub in rehearsals for a production of
ter his transfor-
tobacconist he’d known since his school days. mation into the The Merchant of Venice. The two began an affair—to
In 1918, Reuss returned to Vienna to find his world Alpine farmer. the horror of Neustädter, who took her own life.
To complete the
ruined. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was no ruse, Reuss dyed After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933,
more. The city was beset by food and fuel shortag- every hair on Jewish performers quickly lost work, and Reuss was
his body blond
es. Many theaters had closed. Reuss already had a and made sure running out of money. He continued to exchange
young daughter, Margarethe, and in 1920, Stefanie his director saw letters with the children he’d abandoned, and in
him in a state of
gave birth to a son, Hans. He tried to support the undress. the summer, he wrote to his daughter, Margarethe,
family as an actor, working under the renowned di- who was now 16. He begged her to send proof he’d
rector Emil Geyer. But the job didn’t last long. Reuss been recognized for his service in the First World
fell in love with Geyer’s wife, the German actress War. It worked. Reuss was granted a special perfor-
Ellen Neustädter. Leaving Stefanie and the children mance permit. He continued to work until his per-
in Vienna, Reuss stole away with Neustädter, first to formance in Stettin was disrupted by antisemitic
Hamburg, and then to Berlin, where Reuss quickly thugs two years later.
built a name for himself in the city’s expressionist
theater scene. His acting style was highly physical.
He aimed to portray his characters by exaggerating
their features, like a caricaturist. The famous Austrian festival
By the mid-1920s, he was working with the social-
ist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht, and was
director was seriously
praised by Joseph Roth (an author who would later impressed—and apparently
write The Radetzky March, a classic novel about the oblivious to the fact that the man
decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) for being
the only cast member who was not screaming. His
before him was playing a role
total devotion to his art worried some onlookers. within a role.
By winter 1935, Reuss was on the verge of giving
up on life completely. His brother tried calming him
with brandy. “I had a nervous breakdown after a few
horrible days,” Reuss wrote in a desperate letter to
his friend Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirical writer,
in April 1936. Reuss had starred in Kraus’ thrilling ex-
perimental play The Last Days of Mankind a few years Reuss, left,
stands before
earlier in Berlin—but now nobody would hire him. In a judge (and
spring, he left Vienna for the mountains. a crucifix) in
January 1937.
Reuss moved into a large wooden Alpine house, “Hardly any oth-
perched above a valley and surrounded by jutting er theater affair
has caused as
peaks. Straub had bought the house in 1931, and much of a stir in
done the decorating, and there was a bust of her in recent times,” a
local newspaper
the living room. “An altar to St. Agnesia,” he joked. report declared.
The couple had enjoyed the house as a country re-
treat, a sanctuary for learning lines. Now Reuss was
alone, and not on vacation.
As a last-gasp effort at professional survival, Reuss
resolved to transform himself into an Alpine farmer.
Over the spring and into the summer, Reuss grew a
beard and perfected the local dialect. He bleached
his body hair from head to toe.
In the evenings, Reuss liked to play tarot cards with
Kaspar Altenberger, a local farmer Straub had paid to
look after the house. Reuss disclosed his plan, and Al-
tenberger offered to help. He lent Reuss his own iden-
tity papers—his passport and baptismal certificate.
Reuss had a new official persona. Probably to protect
Altenberger, though, Reuss agreed he would layer an
extra stage name on top of his assumed identity. If the
authorities demanded his papers, he’d give them the
passport of Kaspar Altenberger. But to his audience,
he would be known as Kaspar Brandhofer.
L AT E R T H AT S U M M E R, Reuss, with white hair and a

full beard, made his way down to the valley. The last was Wagner’s comedic opera Die Meistersinger von
of the edelweiss flowers were blooming in the high Nürnberg, and the Great Festival Hall was packed. It
meadows. His destination was the Salzburg Festival, was impossible to spot Reinhardt in the crowds, and
a summer celebration of music and drama held in Reuss retreated to his mountain house. He would
Mozart’s hometown. The festival had been founded have to find another way to smuggle Brandhofer to
by Max Reinhardt, perhaps the most important di- the top of the theater world.
rector in Germany and Austria at the time. Reuss had In August, Reuss wrote a letter to Reinhardt’s wife,
never worked with Reinhardt (who was also Jewish, Helene Thimig. “Dear Madam! I am a farmer in good
and would flee to Hollywood in 1938). Disguised as circumstances, but this stale fact stifles my life force.
Brandhofer, Reuss probably went to Salzburg to in- I have known since I was a boy that I have to be an ac-
troduce himself to the great impresario. tor,” he wrote. “Now I ask: hear me for ten minutes,
It was harder than he’d expected. Thanks to a BYLINES whether before a rehearsal, after a performance in
recent diplomatic agreement between Austria and the dressing room, to see if it’s worth bringing me in
T H E AT R E M U S E U M , V I E N N A
Nazi Germany, which was ten minutes from the Tomas Weber front of Professor Reinhardt.”
is a reporter and
border by car, this year’s festival was the first in art critic based Thimig replied by inviting Reuss to audition for
in London. He
four years that could take place without fear of Nazi previously wrote her husband in Leopoldskron, their lavish rococo
for Smithsonian
disruption. This meant the city was crowded with about a scientist palace on a lake in Salzburg. The next Saturday after-
American tourists, decked out in traditional dirndls who developed a noon, Reuss, playing Brandhofer, strolled through
new way to create
and lederhosen. The festival’s headline performance vivid colors. the palace gardens where parts of The Sound of Mu-

Reuss fled Berlin before the German au-
thorities found him. Using Altenberger’s
papers, he crossed back across the Alps into
Austria, where he was less well known. He
arrived in Vienna in the fall of 1936 and took
a room in the Hotel Holler, an elegant build-
ing in the city’s museum district. He was still
posing as a farmer, and the sight of a man
apparently plucked out of an Alpine mead-
ow attracted curious looks in the midst of all
the traffic, the fancy silverware, the cosmo-
politan crowds.
At the Josefstadt Theater, Reuss audi-
tioned for Ernst Lothar, a director in his 40s
with a rotund face and slicked-back hair. Not
long before, Lothar had refused to audition
Reuss as Reuss—but he was delighted to
consider this unknown mountain farmer.
Reuss told Lothar that while tending to his
cow-belled herds upon the pastures, or fell-
ing wood, he would always carry a script in
the pocket of his lederhosen. He enjoyed re-
citing monologues to the surrounding peaks.
Lothar later noted that Brandhofer had ex-
aggerated gestures and facial expressions, “as
is usually the case with amateurs.” Nonethe-
less, the director added, the novice “showed
quite astonishing gifts.” Where Reuss was of-
ten self-aggrandizing, during the audition he
played Brandhofer as self-deprecating, wor-
rying aloud that he was 40 years old and per-
haps it was too late to break into the theater.
“You definitely have to try it!” shouted a
man from the auditorium. That voice be-
longed to Emil Geyer—the theater’s assis-
tant director who had worked with Reuss
17 years earlier in Vienna. It was Geyer’s
wife, Ellen Neustädter, who’d run away with
sic would later be filmed. He passed an outdoor theater, mar- Reuss in 1919 and then taken her own life in Berlin.
ble vases and baroque fountains, and stepped through the Geyer decided to keep quiet, for reasons he articulated in
door. Reuss and Reinhardt spent five hours together. The sup- a letter to a friend. “Of course it is Reuss,” Geyer wrote. “And
posed farmer performed monologues from William Tell, Mac- yet, it is not. It is a man attempting to knock over the hocus-
beth and Goethe’s Faust. By 9 o’clock that evening, Reinhardt pocus of discrimination. If he is discovered and punished I
was seriously impressed—and apparently oblivious to the shall have a revenge I do not need. . . . [Reuss] is no longer a
fact that the man before him was playing a role within a role. human being who has wronged me but a symbol of human
Reuss left the palace with an effusive letter of recommenda- beings who have been wronged.” Geyer was also Jewish, and
tion. And then he did something more daring still.
Crossing the border into Nazi Germany with his
false papers, Reuss traveled to Berlin, where he audi-
tioned for Hamlet at the Deutsches Theater. His arriv- “It’s Reuss! The actor! I give
al interrupted a rehearsal, and the audition did not go
well. The director, Heinz Hilpert, quickly recognized
you my word of honor, it’s
Reuss behind the beard and Austrian costume. “That him.” After the performance,
wasn’t a farmer from Innsbruck,” one of the actors lat- Schnitzler went up to Reuss
er recalled Hilpert telling a member of the cast. “That
was a Jewish actor, Agnes Straub’s man. . . . The sweat
and confronted him. Reuss
was running off his forehead. I saw his fear of death.” didn’t deny it.
would be arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, de-
ported to Mauthausen concentration camp,
and shot while trying to escape.
LOT H A R OFFERED REUSS THE J O B, and

Reuss moved into a room rented from a con-
cert pianist, all while continuing to embel-
lish his role as Brandhofer. He carried a Nazi
newspaper to rehearsals, and at mealtimes he
struggled to use cutlery. He sharpened table
knives on a whetstone attached to his watch
chain. During rehearsal breaks, he socialized
with the backstage staff. Hans Thimig, Max
Reinhardt’s brother-in-law who also worked
at the theater, later recalled overhearing one
of these conversations and watching Reuss
break down in tears. “I’m just so homesick, so
awfully homesick, when I think of my calves,”
Reuss told a porter. “It’s terrible.”
The play Reuss was rehearsing was based
on Fräulein Else, a novella by the Austrian Jewish “It’s Reuss! The actor!” said Schnitzler. “I give you
In his new life as
author Arthur Schnitzler, best known for writing the Lionel Royce, the my word of honor, it’s him.” After the performance,
novel that became Stanley Kubrick’s erotic thriller Austrian-accent- Schnitzler went up to Reuss and confronted him.
ed actor was
Eyes Wide Shut. The story centers on a 19-year-old girl regularly cast Reuss didn’t deny it.
alone on vacation at a mountain hotel who receives as a Nazi. Above Thimig then confided to Lothar that the Alpine
right, he played
an urgent letter from her mother in Vienna. Her fa- a German farmer was Reuss. In Lothar’s memoir, he wrote
ther is facing prison unless a large sum of money can officer in the he would have been willing to keep the secret, but
1942 spy thriller
be procured within three days. Reuss had been cast Unseen Enemy. a group of actors insisted on informing the public.
as Herr von Dorsday, an elderly antique dealer who The theater published a notice in the press explain-
agrees to write a check on one condition—he must ing that Kaspar Brandhofer was in fact the actor Leo
see Else naked first. At the story’s climax, Else fakes Reuss. The theater allowed him to continue in the
madness in the hotel’s music room and undresses be- role, and they changed his name in the playbill to
fore a crowd of guests, among them von Dorsday. Just Kaspar Brandhofer-Reuss. “I believe that if someone
before the first performance, Lothar walked into the is completely focused on being other,” said Reuss,
dressing room to wish Reuss good luck. The actor sat in an interview published in the Viennese daily Das
in front of his mirror, completely nude. It was import- Echo after his unmasking, “they will be seen as other.”
ant that the director notice that every single hair on The revelation was a scandal, but Reuss had many
his body was peroxide blond. supporters. “There can be no question of fraud in this
After the play opened at the Josefstadt Theater in case,” wrote Egon Friedell, a well-known Austrian in-
early December, Brandhofer’s performance was the tellectual. “The whole theater is a fraud. It’s just usu-
talk of the town. “Excellent, masterly, marvelous!” ally called something more polite: illusion. If, as in
whispered the dramatist Richard Beer-Hofmann as the present case, the illusion is extended to the actor’s
he watched Reuss perform. The mountain man was private life, that only enriches the theater.” The right-
profiled in the newspapers. Critics lauded his perfor-
mance—one called him an actor with “a gripping,
unusual intensity.”
But later that week, an actor who had once shared Over the course of more
a dressing room with Reuss in Berlin was in the audi-
than 40 films, his roles
E V E R E T T C O L L ECT I O N (2 )
ence. Heinrich Schnitzler, the son of the man who’d

written the novella, was also the play’s producer, and included a Nazi colonel, a
he recognized Reuss instantly. During the intermis- German naval commander,
sion, he rushed to Thimig’s office.
“Do you know who that is?” said Schnitzler.
a concentration camp guard
“Well, a farmer,” said Thimig. and a Stormtrooper.
ly, or if someone discovers and makes public I am
not who I now seem to be, I ask that you make the
following lines known to the public, so that this
beautiful world, which has become ugly, may learn
how hideously it acts.” The judge read on as Reuss
described his anguish at being denied his vocation.
“I am the actor Leo Reuss, expelled from Germany
because of his not-quite-right ancestors. I say ‘actor’
because I am an actor with my heart and soul, with
blood and every bodily sense, and my life loses its
meaning for me if I am not allowed to be one.”
The judge, however, was unmoved, and Reuss
received 48 hours of jail time and two years of pro-
bation, along with a fine of 100 shillings. “Do you
accept the verdict?” asked the judge. “I accept,”
Reuss said, in a bold response the court reporter
compared to a gunshot.
After the trial, Reuss worked for a few months un-
der his real name in small Yiddish theaters. The Vi-
ennese cultural elite that had so warmly welcomed
Kaspar the farmer cast out Leo the Jew.
But one especially influential person had tak-
en note of his multilayered performance at the
Josefstadt Theater. Louis Mayer, another Jewish
man born in Eastern Europe, had already made a
name for himself as the founder of Metro-Gold-
wyn-Mayer Studios in Hollywood. While Reuss
was busy trying to prove himself on European
stages, his Jewish peers had crossed the ocean
and founded the studios that launched the Amer-
ican movie industry.
In the summer of 1937, Reuss signed a contract
with MGM Studios. In September, after one last
performance in Vienna (playing Napoleon at the
Theater an der Wien), he immigrated to Los An-
geles with his two adult children, who took on the
names Margaret and John. Reuss restyled himself
yet again, taking the name Lionel Royce.
wing press, though, which had sung the praises of In 1939, Royce starred in the first anti-German pro-
Taking on a
Reuss’ performance a few days earlier, now saw confir- multilayered paganda film made by a major studio: Confessions of
mation of characteristic Jewish duplicity and demand- role once again, a Nazi Spy. Royce played one of the Nazis. From then
Lionel Royce
ed that the government charge Reuss with fraud. played a Nazi on, the heavily accented immigrant was cast in many
spy imperson- German roles. Over the course of more than 40 films,
ating an Arab
sultan in the he played a Nazi colonel, a German naval command-
1943 serial movie er, a concentration camp guard and a Stormtrooper.
Man Hunt in the
African Jungle. In 1941, Agnes Straub died in Berlin after she was
O N JA N UA RY 1 9, 1 93 7, R E U S S —still with his blond severely injured in a car accident. Stefanie, Royce’s
beard and wearing an elegant black suit—entered a Vi- first wife and the mother of his children who’d stayed
ennese courtroom to defend himself against charges behind in Europe, was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.
of using false documents. It is unclear exactly how the Royce died of a heart attack on April 1, 1946, at age
authorities came to realize that Reuss had been using 55, while entertaining U.S. troops stationed in the
Altenberger’s identity; the publicity may have sparked Philippines. His final film appearance was as an un-
an investigation. An audience packed with actors, credited German alongside Rita Hayworth in Gilda.
directors, photographers and journalists looked on There were numerous obituaries. One, in a paper in
as Reuss’ lawyer presented the judge with an 11-page Northern California, appeared under the headline
letter Reuss had sent him before opening night. The “Nazi Portrayer Dies in Manila.” Nowhere did the ar-
judge read it aloud: “If I die, naturally or voluntari- ticle mention that the actor had been Jewish.

R ELEA R NING
Right, a student tracker in

California during a certifica-
tion evaluation. On this page,
a bobcat footprint—in this
case atypical, as the claws,
usually retracted, left a mark.

HUMANS PERFECTED THE ART
OF WILDLIFE TRACKING OVER
MILLENNIA. NOW RESEARCHERS
ARE REDISCOVERING ITS
EXCEPTIONAL WORTH
THE L A NG UAG E
OF THE L A N D
by BEN GOLDFA R B
photographs by METTE LAMPCOV
h e 28t h q u e s t i o n o f t h e h a r d e s t ex a m I ’d t a ke n s i n c e
c o l l e g e wa s a s m u d g e d f o o t p r i n t p r e s s e d l i g h t l y
into damp sand. The track possessed four teardrop-
s h a p e d t o e s a n d a va g u e l y t r a p e z o i d a l h e e l p a d ; o n e
t o e, t h i r d f r o m t h e l e f t , j u t te d a b o v e t h e o t h e r s , l i ke a h u m a n ’s
m i d d l e f i n g e r. I k n e l t c l o s e r, s c a n n i n g f o r t h e t e l l t a l e p i n p r i c ks
o f c l a w s , a n d s a w n o n e. T h a t s u g g e s t e d f e l i n e : C a t s , u n l i ke d o g s ,
h a v e r e t r a c t a b l e c l a w s , a n d t h e y t e n d t o wa l k w i t h o u t t h e i r n a i l s
ex t e n d e d . I n m y n o t e b o o k , I w r o t e, t e n t a t i ve l y, B O B C A T .
The hypothetical bobcat had been wandering Tracking helped to transform a small, furtive ape
a sandy floodplain in the California desert, where into a global force.
I found myself taking a wildlife tracking test one No longer does our survival depend upon our abil-
April afternoon. The evaluation was administered ity to stalk a springbok. Homo technologicus is more
by Tracker Certification, the North American wing attuned to screens than to scats; the trails we follow
of CyberTracker Conservation, a South African non- are paved highways rather than pawprints. Even the
profit that has conducted tracking exams for 30 years. field of wildlife biology has become reliant on tech-
Around me, other students were engaged in their own nology. Scientists use satellite collars to monitor car-
examinations—peering at a bone-filled lump (great ibou from their desks; drones hover over penguins in
horned owl pellet), inspecting snipped willow stems Antarctica; motion-activated cameras snap photos
(woodrat chew), contemplating stick-like prints at the of every creature that crosses their infrared beams.
creek’s edge (thirsty scrub jay tracks). The vibe was li- Today a herpetologist can identify each frog, toad and sala-
brary-like, studious and hushed, as we attempted to mander in a creek by sifting through snippets of DNA in the
read the land’s open book. merest vial of water. Crouching over skunk prints and jackrab-
We were participating in an art as ancient as hom- bit pellets feels analog by contrast, even anachronistic.
inids ourselves. Tracking, by allowing humans to Yet old-school tracking—a cheap, noninvasive method ca-
more effectively pursue game, drove us into hunt- pable of providing astonishing quantities of data—is experi-
ing groups, grew our brains, compelled us to adopt encing a revival. These days biologists are examining tracks for
language. In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted many purposes, from forestalling wildlife conflicts to averting
World, Carl Sagan posited that tracking shaped roadkill. In Wisconsin, trackers are following wolves to prevent
our evolution: “Those with a scientific bent, those them from running afoul of livestock and humans; in Wash-
able patiently to observe . . . acquire more food . . . ington State, they’re observing faunal footprints returning to
they and their hereditary lines prosper,” he wrote. river valleys after dam removal. Biologists have trailed the an-
P E A BO DY M U S E U M O F A R C H A EO LO GY & E T H N O LO GY
telope-like saola through Southeast Asia’s mountains in hopes

of capturing and breeding it, and stalked lynx and wolverines
across Montana to understand their abundance and distribu-
tion. Many tracking-based studies make use of data collected by
volunteers, who, with training, can follow animals as skillfully
as academic scientists. “It can be this very accessible, democrat-
ic way of gaining information,” David Moskowitz, a naturalist,
photographer and expert tracker, told me.
In the past two decades, Tracker Certification has conduct-
ed nearly 700 formal field evaluations during which it accred-
ited more than 2,300 individual students. They make up an
eclectic array of people. The participants in my workshop in-

cluded photographers, teachers and hunters; there had moved their family to the Kalahari when their
Students
were biologists, yes, but also chemical engineers and prepare for a daughter was 19, and the Ju/’hoansi’s practical bril-
real estate brokers who spent their weekends volun- field exam. The liance instantly awed Thomas. The Ju/’hoansi shot
nonprofit Tracker
teering on mammal surveys. At the morning’s outset, Certification wildebeest and other game with poisoned arrow-
we’d gathered in a sandy wash and, squinting into North America heads, then tailed their dying quarry for many miles.
has evaluated
the rising sun, explained our sundry motivations. more than 3,000 This required not only distinguishing tracks at the
One student said he longed to “read the little letters people since species level, but also recognizing individual animals:
2004; roughly
that the world is writing you”; another declared that 2,300 passed. If a herd of kudus split up into several bands, the
he “didn’t want to feel like a tourist” in the natural Ju/’hoansi had to remain on the trail of the particular
world. “You’re all helping to revive real field skills kudu they’d shot. It was a skill “that must be seen to be
and natural history skills across the planet, in a way appreciated, especially because none of the tracks are
that is desperately needed,” Casey McFarland, Track- clear footprints,” wrote Thomas, in her 2006 book The
er Certification’s ebullient executive director, had de- Old Way. “Mostly they are dents in the sand among
clared. Then he’d released us—to scrutinize spoor, to many other scuffed dents made by the other kudus.”
pore over prints, to track. In the 1950s, Yet even Thomas couldn’t believe how her compan-
Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas ions followed the hyena across an expanse of bare rock.
F
O R N E A R LY the entirety of human exis- documented the “They were not simply following the line of travel, be-
tracking skills of
tence, our species regularly performed the Ju/’hoansi, cause out on the rock, the route of the hyena made a
hunter-gather-
feats of tracking that, from our modern ers in southern curve of about one hundred degrees,” she wrote. There
vantage, resemble magic. So Elizabeth Africa’s Kalahari were no footprints, no drops of blood, no bent grasses.
Desert.
Marshall Thomas learned one day in the 1950s, when Still, when the party reached the sand beyond the pla-
she set out with three Ju/’hoansi, hunter-gatherers teau, there resumed the hyena’s tracks, exactly where
in Namibia’s Kalahari Desert, on the trail of a hyena. the men expected. “How they did it I have no idea.”
Thomas’ parents, ethnographers and adventurers, North America’s Indigenous peoples, of course,

shared an equal intimacy with tracks. “It’s culture
for me—it’s in my religion and my people’s history,”
Ahíga Snyder, a Diné, or Navajo, wildlife researcher
who co-runs Pathways for Wildlife, a research group
in California, told me. Tracks featured prominently
in the Diné animal stories that Snyder’s grandfather
told him. Take Black Bear, whose front paws have
straight, evenly sized toes that can sometimes make it
hard to tell a right foot track from a left—because, per
Diné legend, the bear woke up late on the day that the
Great Spirit assigned each animal its tracks and, in his
haste, slipped his moccasins onto the wrong feet. Or
consider Deer, whose hooves formed an arrow said to
point toward prosperity, appropriate for such an im-
portant game animal. Understand tracks, Snyder said,
and “the whole world opens up differently.”
Scientists held tracking in high esteem well into
the 20th century. In a 1936 paper titled “Following
Fox Trails,” the biologist Adolph Murie described
spending months shadowing red foxes in Michigan.
(Sifting through their droppings, Murie reported
“many rabbit bones and pieces of fur, the skull and
a piece of the hide of a muskrat, the rear half of a fox
squirrel, the posterior part of a skull, scapula, and
femur of a lamb, part of an adult deer sternum, and
some blue jay feathers.”) As technology improved,
however, biologists adopted tools like satellite col-
lars and motion-activated cameras, which allowed
researchers to glean vital data across vast areas with
less labor. Tracking fell out of favor.
In some ways, tracking’s revival began in the 1980s,
when a South African physics student named Louis
Liebenberg abandoned his studies, bought a Land
Cruiser and drove into the Kalahari Desert to com-
mune with the San, a group of hunter-gatherers that
includes the Ju/’hoansi. Liebenberg had always loved
to track; while serving in the military, he’d occasion-
ally abandon his post to sketch animal footprints.
Liebenberg spent years with the San, watching them Casey McFar-
track and nearly dying of heatstroke during an ante- land, Tracker
Certification’s
lope hunt himself. Tracking was not antithetical to executive di-
science, he concluded. It was science. Following an- rector, left, and
Marcus Reyner-
imals inherently required observation and inference; son, a wilder-
what was pursuing a trail if not testing a hypothesis? ness school in-
structor, served
Just as physicists deduced the existence of subatom- as evaluators
during a recent
ic particles from the movements of visible matter, exam.
San hunters reconstructed the behaviors of invisible
animals from tracks. It was conceivable, Liebenberg
wrote, that “the creative scientific imagination had
its origin in the evolution of the art of tracking.” Mark Elbroch, a
wildlife biologist
That art, however, was at risk of disappearing. Many and decorated
San neither wrote nor read; meanwhile, ranch fences tracker, helped
bring Tracker
across the Kalahari had curtailed wildlife migrations Certification’s
and threatened hunter-gatherer life ways. Around standards from
South Africa to
campfires in the early 1990s, Liebenberg and a San North America.
named !Nate began to discuss how to simultaneous- His guidebooks
are renowned
ly preserve traditional knowledge and provide Indig- within the field.

enous trackers a credential they could use to secure the next year, Elbroch led one for staff at the Texas
jobs as ecotourism guides and park rangers. In 1994, Parks and Wildlife Department. “At first they were
Liebenberg began conducting training workshops and confused and frustrated: ‘What the heck are we look-
accreditation tests for San trackers. He and others also ing at?’” Elbroch recalled. “By midday, everyone was
developed an elaborate pictorial system, first operated having the time of their lives.” CyberTracker’s stan-
on a PalmPilot and later on smartphones, that allowed dards had been developed on zebras and African li-
trackers to record and share their observations. They ons; they would be honed on mule deer and cougar.
called the system, released in 1996, CyberTracker.
T
Together, the CyberTracker software and Lieb- H E S E D AY S E L B R O C H lives on the
enberg’s certification process proved their worth. Olympic Peninsula, the wedge
Non-literate San co-authored peer-reviewed papers of temperate rainforest that juts
on topics such as black rhino behavior and found from western Washington like a
work defending animals from poachers. In 2002, thumb. One autumn morning, I set off into
hoping to expand his system to the United the Olympic woods with Elbroch and Kim
States, Liebenberg attended a wolf tracking Sager-Fradkin, a wildlife program manager
workshop in Idaho, where he met Mark El- with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, to re-
broch, a young wildlife biologist who’d cut his construct a day in the life of a mountain lion.
teeth studying mountain lions in Wyoming. The cat was a 2-year-old male, named Orion,
Elbroch spent portions of the next three years whom scientists had outfitted with a satellite col-
in the Kalahari, trailing animals from lions to lar under the auspices of a long-term study called the
porcupines with Liebenberg and his San col- Olympic Cougar Project. Mountain lions are general-
leagues and, between trips, applying his newfound A Virginia ly peripatetic, but, according to Orion’s collar, he’d
opossum and its
knowledge to black bear and cougar tracks at home tracks—Question recently lingered in one area for more than a day—a
near Santa Barbara. Elbroch eventually aced his ex- 51 of a recent hint that he’d made a kill and hunkered down to eat.
exam. Elbroch’s
ams in the Kalahari and Kruger National Park, and field manual Now Elbroch hoped to find Orion’s meal and piece
he and Liebenberg set about importing CyberTrack- shows the front together the circumstances surrounding his feast.
and hind foot-
er’s protocols to the United States. In 2004, they con- prints. The three of us tramped through stands of alder
ducted an evaluation in the California desert and, and shafts of sunlight. “Bobcat scrape,” said Elbroch,
LOW E R L E F T: DAV I D M OS KOW I T Z ; R O G E R H A L L / S C I E N T I F I C I L LU ST R AT I O N

who sported a gray-flecked beard and a T-shirt bear-
ing his own detailed illustration of a cougar skull. He
nodded to a barely perceptible patch where a cat had
cleared the leaf litter and urinated to mark its terri-
tory. Moments later, we came upon another, larger
scrape. “Notice the size difference? This is probably
our boy.” He picked up a broken fern frond, browned
and curled at its edges. “Following animals is all
about color and pattern,” he whispered.
Beyond the scrape ran a faint swath of exposed
ground where Orion had hauled his prize. “Whatever’s
at the end of the rainbow, this is where it starts.” He
turned to me. “All right, now you’re loose. Lead on.”
I blanched. Mark Elbroch asking me to trail a
cougar was like Jimmy Page suggesting I play a few
chords. “They almost always drag downhill,” he said.
I stumbled down a steep slope, clambering over moss-
garbed deadfall in pursuit of an apparent dragline. At
the bottom, I paused to get my bearings. Nary a scrape
to be seen; the ferns looked as fresh as though they’d
sprouted that morning.
“We’re up here,” Elbroch called from a ridge.
“I thought they dragged downhill,” I complained.
He smiled and shrugged.
I rejoined Elbroch and Sager-Fradkin as they
traipsed along, pointing out what trackers call
“sign,” or any animal trace besides a footprint:
the exposed root where the carcass had rubbed off moss, the Native people alike. Studying the dietary preferences of males
matted earth where Orion had curled up to digest. Plate-sized like Orion, who often run afoul of humans while searching for
globs of bear scat lay everywhere, and the bruins’ beds cra- territories, is especially vital. “The naive ones don’t really know
tered the forest floor. “Bears are big, lumbering beasts that where to go and how to avoid people,” Sager-Fradkin said. In-
leave a lot of sign,” Sager-Fradkin said. “They’re not delicate stead, they occasionally develop the unfortunate habits of at-
and neat like cougars are.” tacking goats, calves and other livestock, and following small
She and Elbroch were looking for the cache, the trove where prey like raccoons into neighborhoods until they learn to hunt
Orion had hidden his leftovers. Elbroch paused before an deer. Understanding the diets of these rambunctious cats may
unassuming smudge of dirt, perhaps bloodstained, and be- help prevent conflicts between the carnivores and people, and
gan to root with a stick. The odor of rotting meat wafted up. protect the species upon which dispersing cougars rely.
He plunged his hand into the soil and, with the flourish of a “We’re redefining these animals to hopefully learn how to
magician revealing the ace of spades, held up the skull of a live with them,” Elbroch said as we crouched in the duff, ex-
mountain beaver—an odd rodent, unrelated to true beavers, amining bone shards. There are still questions that can only be
whose burrows pockmarked the hillsides. A few inches deeper answered by digging in the dirt.
and he unearthed an off-white fragment of zygomatic arch, a
A
bone that once resided in the head of a small deer. A narrative F T E R M Y E X P E R I E N C E trailing Orion, I resolved
cohered: Orion had killed a fawn, lugged it here to consume to try tracking myself. I bought one of Elbroch’s
and stash, and, between helpings, captured a passing moun- guidebooks and began canvassing my home land-
tain beaver, as though nabbing a bacon-wrapped scallop off scape in Colorado. I marveled at a twisted mink
an hors d’oeuvres tray. Before Orion could disinter his fawn, scat packed with a snake’s tiny skeleton and the pointillist art-
though, he’d been run off by a bear. There was no way to con- work inscribed in aspen bark by a black bear’s claws. Yet my cal-
firm the story’s veracity, but it felt entirely plausible. lowness left me unfulfilled. Consulting Elbroch’s books might
This exercise wasn’t only an enthralling party trick—it also lead me to believe that a pawprint had been left by a red fox
had profound value for the Olympic Cougar Project. While sat- rather than a gray, but I couldn’t be certain. I craved validation.
ellite collars could tell Elbroch and Sager-Fradkin where cou- That was how I ended up in California, scrutinizing bobcat
gars approached I-5 and other highways, thus guiding the loca- prints in hopes of passing a tracking test. The exam’s format
tion of future wildlife passages, only tracking could reveal what was simple, its content challenging. Beforehand, our evalu-
they ate. Figuring out how many deer and elk the peninsula’s ators—McFarland, Tracker Certification’s executive direc-
cougars killed, for example, could help tribes determine hunt- tor, and Marcus Reynerson, a senior instructor at a wilder-
ing quotas, thus keeping game on the landscape for felines and ness school—had scoured the desert for animal tracks, scat,

explain the provenance of a bone shard (a coyote’s scapula) and
a silk-lined hole (a tarantula’s burrow) and a white crystalline
splatter (wonderfully, calcium from the urine of a desert cotton-
tail). Most of all, we had to know tracks. A raven’s inner toe was
tucked close to its middle, whereas a jay’s toes were clustered to-
gether. Two long paddle-shaped marks, punctuated by a pair of
small circles, were the hind and front feet of a resting jackrabbit.
Each time we finished answering a batch of questions, we
gathered to debrief. I’d been dreading this part, which prom-
ised to expose my ignorance, but I needn’t have worried: The
vibe was less oral examination and more Socratic dialogue.
How do you tell a domestic dog’s claws from a coyote’s?
(Among other differences, dogs leave blunter marks, since
their nails are clipped or filed down on pavement.) How do we
know this turd came from a toad? (It’s gleaming with insect
exoskeletons.) McFarland and Reynerson, good-natured and
nonjudgmental, greeted even incorrect answers with an excla-
SIGNS OF LIFE mation of “Fantastic!” Wrongness was an opportunity to learn.
Tracking relies on more than identifying
footprints. Experts interpret all manner of This point was reinforced when we were asked to identify
evidence an animal leaves behind, known the source of chew marks on a prickly pear. “I thought it was
collectively as “sign.” Mammal sign can
include scat, burrows and bedding areas. a mule deer,” one student said. (I’d guessed bighorn sheep,
Birds might discard feathers or regurgitate which often eat cactus in the desert.) “Excellent!” McFarland
pellets—undigested food that can contain
bones, fur, seeds and other substances. enthused. Then he pointed out what was missing from the
Clockwise from left: a common raven pellet; scene: the spines of the cactus. A deer or sheep would have
an illustration of the bird; a student exam-
ines scat during an evaluation. nibbled the prickly pear’s flesh around the needles, which
would then have fallen to the ground; their absence suggested
that some creature had carried them off. This, then, was the
toothwork of a woodrat, which had borne away the spines to
armor its nest. “They’re getting a food source, but they’re also
getting protective equipment,” McFarland said. Even a dimin-
utive rodent wrote upon the earth.
Sometimes, as we perused tracks and sign, I was appalled
by my ignorance: How could I have confused that rabbit pellet
for a squirrel’s? Other times I felt insightful, as when I picked
out the shuffle of a quail from a welter of scuffs. Most of all I
appreciated the rarity of this experience: to hunch, for long
and silent minutes, over a scratch or dropping. I felt that I was
back in an English classroom, slowly digesting and interpret-
ing a complex text. “This is the first alphabet that we as a hu-
man species had to be able to read,” Sarah Spaeth, an evalua-
tion assistant, told me during a quiet moment.
Spaeth, who was visiting from western Washington, is at
the vanguard of the tracking revolution. The director of con-
servation and strategic partnerships for the Jefferson Land
Trust, Spaeth had begun tracking more than a decade earlier,
after she’d attended a workshop and gotten hooked. (During
gnawed twigs and other oddities. They planted an orange one early evaluation, she’d correctly identified the pockmark
R O G E R H A L L / S C I E N T I F I C I L LU ST R AT I O N
flag at each impression; our charge was to figure out what produced by a male elk’s urine stream.) She found tracking
was responsible for the various marks. (Some questions were to be invaluable in land conservation, since it helped her
complex multiparters that required us to identify not only confirm that wildlife was indeed inhabiting and moving be-
what animal had left a given track, but also its pace and the tween the parcels that her organization protected. “It’s such
responsible foot: left front, right hind and so on.) Once we’d an incredible tool,” she said.
devised our answers—which, in my case, could charitably be She is hardly the only researcher to rediscover tracking’s
described as semi-educated guesses—we whispered them, or worth. For the past decade, McFarland told me, Tracker Certi-
showed them in writing, to clipboard-wielding assistants. fication’s goal had been to train and certify as many trackers as
From a distance, the desert appeared a barren expanse of rock possible. Its recent growth has been exponential: In 2021, the
and sand, but up close it throbbed with life. We were asked to group conducted 46 evaluations in North America. In 2023, it

LASTING IMPRESSIONS ran 92. Now the organization was preparing for its next
phase, deploying trackers in the realms of wildlife re-
Four toes or five? Do they resemble teardrops? Cigars? Can you see nail search and conservation, and exposing academics and
marks? Fur? One heel pad or two? What to consider when examining tracks government agencies to tracking’s validity. McFarland
F: Front footprint: Maximum life-size length in inches himself was leading that endeavor: He would soon
H: Hind footprint spend ten days trailing bears with biologists from the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in hopes of
quantifying how many fawns the ursids were devour-
Length ing. “There are these cool areas where skilled trackers
in combination with modern technology could pro-
F: ½ F: 9¼16 F: 1 H
duce some awesome results,” he said.
H H
F
White-footed mouse Ord’s kangaroo rat Eastern chipmunk O R T R A C K I N G to truly influence wildlife
Peromyscus leucopus Dipodomys ordii Tamias striatus
biology, however, it will have to overcome
reputational challenges. Tracking, after
all, is a methodology reliant upon human
interpretation—and humans are fallible. One 2009
study in the Journal of Wildlife Management found
that Texas biologists surveying otters fre-
quently mistook raccoon, opossum
H H and even house cat tracks for otter
F: 1 ¾ F: 2 ¼16 prints. As the authors cautioned, “is-
sues with observer reliability . . . are
potentially widespread.”
Eastern gray squirrel Striped skunk
Sciurus carolinensis Mephitis mephitis
H
F: 1 ¾8 F: 1 11¼16
H
Marsh rabbit Kit fox
Sylvilagus palustris Vulpes macrotis
Gray wolf
Canis lupus
F: 5 ¾
H
Nine-banded armadillo
Dasypus novemcinctus
F: 2
F O OT P R I N T D R AW I N G S : M A R K E L B R O C H
Granted, technology itself isn’t incontrovertible: In a

study published in the Journal of Mammalogy in 2018,
Elbroch found that tracking produced more reliable es-
H timates of mountain lion kill rates than computer mod-
F: 2 ½8
3
els based on satellite data. Yet concerns about track-
Bobcat
Lynx rufus ing’s accuracy still dog the scientists who employ it.
S O U R C E : M A M M A L T R AC KS & S I G N : A G U I D E TO N O RT H A M E R I CA N S P EC I ES , BY M A R K E L B R O C H , STAC K P O L E B O O KS, 200 3 & 20 1 9

“On nearly every paper that I’ve submitted where I’ve is likewise using tracking to smooth human-animal
Terry Hunefeld,
used tracking, I’ve had the reviewer criticize the use of a professional relations. Diamond and Snyder specialize in the field
tracking and be like, ‘That’s not really good enough,’” tracker, analyzes of habitat connectivity—figuring out how animals
the corpse of a
Sage Raymond, a Canadian wildlife biologist, told me. Botta’s pocket navigate landscapes so that environmental groups
Raymond is among a burgeoning class of scientists gopher. The bur- and agencies can protect those corridors. For Path-
rowing rodents
trying to take tracking mainstream. In 2021, she moved leave telltale ways for Wildlife, the first step is searching for deer,
to Edmonton, Alberta, to study urban-adapted coyotes, fan-shaped coyote, badger and mountain lion sign, to determine
mounds of soil
and realized the snowbound woods were rife with “lit- at their tunnel faunal travel routes; they then install motion-acti-
tle coyote highways” of pawprints and scat. Over three entrances. vated cameras along those thoroughfares to observe
years, she followed more than 300 miles of animal behavior. In 2022, Diamond and Snyder
coyote trails—up ridges and down ravines, found the tracks of migrating mule deer inter-
through thickets and under bushes. (“I secting with Highway 395 near Lake Tahoe,
shredded some coats,” she recalled.) The set up a camera, and captured heartbreak-
canids’ tracks often led Raymond to their ing video of a deer getting pulverized
dens, which, she said, are “embedded in the by a car—a tragedy, yes, but one that
anthropogenic matrix”: in other words, near hu- helped convince the state to fund a
mans and our infrastructure. “People have no idea wildlife overpass to usher the herd
that there’s a coyote with a full-on den and eight pups across the asphalt. Thanks to tracking, Diamond said,
just 20 meters from their property line,” Raymond said. “that deer’s life is not in vain.”
Although coyotes tend to be shy, polite neighbors, Ultimately, tracking doesn’t clash with camera
they occasionally approach humans and pets and traps and other technology—it harmonizes with
can attack when their pups are threatened, especially BYLINES them. Few researchers have proved that point more
when they are habituated to human food—conflicts clearly than Zoë Jewell, a Duke-affiliated wildlife bi-
Ben Goldfarb
that Raymond’s research could help alleviate. Ed- is the author of ologist and co-founder of the group WildTrack. Jew-
monton’s coyotes, Raymond has found, excavate their Crossings: How ell’s passion for tracking originated in the 1990s, while
Road Ecology
dens on hillslopes covered in thick brush. If a likely Is Shaping the studying black rhinos in Zimbabwe. Her research
Future of Our
den site occurs near, say, a school, “maybe just thin Planet. entailed working with rhinos that had been sedated
some of that vegetation, and that’s probably enough and fitted with radio collars, a process so stressful that
The Danish-born
to disincentivize coyotes from having a den.” Tracking photographer some females slowed their reproduction or miscar-
Mette Lampcov is
wild creatures helps us coexist with them. working on a long- ried; meanwhile, local trackers mocked her fancy re-
Tanya Diamond, Ahíga Snyder’s partner at the Cal- term project about ceivers. “All you need to do is look at the ground,” they
ALAMY
climate change in
ifornia-based research group Pathways for Wildlife, California. told her. She learned to track and, over the course of

a decade, developed a protocol for photographing the otters to mice. She also began to work with students
footprints of rhinos and other wildlife and differenti- Jonathan at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop a
Shapiro, a
ating the prints by age and sex. In a 2001 study in the Vermont-based machine-learning program that could identify foot-
wilderness
Journal of Zoology, she and colleagues showed that, by instructor and print photos. Although Jewell initially doubted that
measuring and comparing the precise dimensions of certified “spe- artificial intelligence was up to the task, WildTrack’s
cialist” tracker
footprints, they could identify individual rhinos with on the East A.I. program can today identify 20 species with
up to 95 percent accuracy. “If you work with trackers Coast, during near-perfect accuracy, and individual animals of nine
an evaluation in
and interpret their knowledge, there’s a huge amount the California of those species around 87 percent of the time. And the
of benefit to be had,” Jewell told me. desert. program is only growing more powerful as volunteer
Over time, Jewell applied her footprint measure- scientists, from hikers in Colorado to the San in the
ment technique to other species, from cheetahs to Kalahari, submit images of footprints to WildTrack’s

camera traps, which, for all their virtues,
only collect data where you put them. By
contrast, Jewell pointed out, “footprints cov-
er the landscape; you can pick them up any-
where. Once you’ve learned to look down,
the earth is almost like a canvas buzzing with
information.”
A
N D T H A T C A N VA S doesn’t mere-
ly offer a portrait of other spe-
cies’ lives. It demonstrates all
we share with them. Through-
out my evaluation in California, Reyner-
son and McFarland took pains to point out
how conjoined evolutionary history man-
ifested in tracks. The slender fingers of a
raccoon recalled our own dexterous hands;
mule deer prints occasioned a soliloquy on
the anatomy of the hoof, whose keratinous
sheaths are effectively the modified nails
of our middle two fingers. “When we start
to think of these animals as our cousins,”
Reynerson said, “we suddenly understand
tracks in a different way.”
If tracking demonstrates our common-
alities with wild animals, it also illustrates
how thoroughly we’re annihilating them.
At one point during the two-day evaluation,
Reynerson and McFarland asked us to iden-
tify a male long-tailed weasel, his sharp face
furred in a handsome black mask, that had
been killed by a car. The weasel seemed to
symbolize the horrors that humans wreak
upon nature—and to suggest the tragedy
inherent to modern tracking. To track in the
Anthropocene is to document loss; as biodi-
versity collapses, its absence is reflected in
the ground itself.
Yet tracking also indicates how much life
remains. The evaluation’s final day was held
at a park blanketed in oak savanna, a rich
biome that teemed with sign. We identified
the gooey feces of a turkey, the silken trap
of a funnel-web spider, the stride of a road-
runner—a “cool little dinosaur of a bird that
moves around in these arid lands,” Reyner-
database using a public app. Today A.I.-based tracking is being son said. I pictured the roadrunner sprinting after a lizard, elon-
used from South Africa, where biologists are monitoring mouse gated feet stamping backward Ks upon the sand, and felt glad.
populations, to Nepal, where researchers are helping herders Perhaps this explains some of the growing fascination with
figure out precisely which tigers are killing their livestock. tracking—the compulsion to reconnect to the wildlife we’re
Jewell’s enthusiasm for prints has not always won her favor. losing. As tracking’s ranks have swelled, its demographics
After she published her first rhino paper, some biologists chafed have evolved. Among the evaluation assistants was Todd Cool-
at its implicit critique of the traditional “dart-and-collar” ap- ey, a Black tracker from the Bay Area who works for an equity-
proach. Others, she recalled, deemed tracking an antiquated minded credit union. Many minority trackers confront an ob-
form of “witchcraft.” In fact, she said, the reverse is true: The so- stacle course of barriers, Cooley pointed out, including the cost
phistication and flexibility of Zimbabwean trackers make West- of attending an evaluation (mine ran $360) and the safety and
ern scientific techniques look primitive. Take motion-activated transportation challenges that C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 88

THE SLEUTH
AT HOME
Isabella Dalla
Ragione at her
home in rural
Perugia. Right,
a selection of
the bounty from
Dalla Ragione’s
orchard,
including
apples, pears,
plums, almonds,
hazelnuts and
grapes.

THE
FRUIT
DETECTIVE
Renaissance
paintings, medieval
archives, cloistered
orchards—how one
Italian scientist is
uncovering secrets
that could help
combat a growing
agricultural crisis
by M A R K S C H A P I R O
photographs by
SIMONA GHIZZONI
When Isabella Dalla
Ragione assesses a
Renaissance painting,
she doesn’t immediately
notice the brushstrokes
or the magnificence
of the imagery. The first
thing she notices is
On a spring day earlier this year, I stride with Dal- blood. The vaulted ceiling, the spiritual imagery,
la Ragione into the National Gallery of Umbria, in a the murmurs and footfalls of other museum-
14th-century stone castle built atop the hillside city goers give the scene a sacred feeling.
of Perugia. Umbria, a region in central Italy next to But before we can linger, Dalla Ragione, at 67
Tuscany, is known more for its lush green spaces, fast-talking and spirited, with chic glasses and
hillside cities and Etruscan and Roman ruins than for stylishly short gray hair, rushes us past the paint-
its art. But the painters of Renaissance Italy traveled ing and on to somewhere else. “Come on, let’s go,
between regions, and some of the works on display there’s another one you must see!” she insists as we
in Perugia are as awe-inspiring as those in Florence. take off down another long corridor.
We breeze through room after room, passing a blur of She steers us to one more Madonna with Child,
masterworks by the likes of Gentile da Fabriano and the center of an altarpiece painted by Bernardino
Benozzo Gozzoli, until Dalla Ragione stops before a di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio, in 1495 or
radiant painting that fills an entire room of its own. 1496. It is all glimmering blues and reds and golds.
The arresting work is by Piero della Francesca, an “Look, there,” she exclaims, pointing to the bottom
artistic giant of the 15th century. It shows the Ma- of the painting. At the Madonna’s feet, just off the
donna, wrapped in a deep blue robe, cradling a tow- gold hem of her azure robe, are three gnarly looking apples—oddly
headed baby Jesus. But Dalla Ragione points me to shaped varieties you’d never see in a market today.
what looks like a small bunch of translucent marbles For most viewers, they would be an afterthought. For Dalla
in Jesus’s tiny hand: cherries! They’re pale red with Ragione, the apples, including a variety known in the fruit sci-
a white tint—acquaiola cherries, a variety that has ence lexicon as api piccola, represent a key to restoring Italy’s
almost disappeared in Italy but back then was quite disappearing fruit agriculture, with characteristics not found in
common. Their juice was seen as symbolic of Christ’s today’s apples: Crunchy and tart, they are capable of being stored

TINY CLUES
In the center of Piero della
Francesca’s Polyptych of St.
Anthony, Jesus holds precious
fruits that Dalla Ragione has
identified as acquaiola cher-
ries, once abundant in
Italy, now all but gone.
among all of Italy’s major fruit

trees continues to plunge.
PEACH DETAIL: PEACHES AND APRICOTS, BARTOLOMEO BIMBI / ALINARI ARCHIVES, FLORENCE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES (4); © GALLERIA NA ZIONALE DELL’UMRIA, PERUGIA (2)
In fact, Dalla Ragione has spent
more than a decade scouring the
masterpieces of 15th- and 16th-
century art for answers to one of
the great questions of Italian agricul-
ture: Whatever happened to the boister-
ous selection of fruits that, for centuries,
were a celebrated part of Italian cuisine and
culture? Slowly and indefatigably, she has
been rediscovering those fruits, first in ar-
chives and paintings and then, incredibly,
in small forgotten plots across Italy. Her
nonprofit, Archeologia Arborea, is helping
farmers and governments around the world
preserve and even bring back into cultiva-
tion all manner of forgotten fruits. In the
process, Dalla Ragione has become a glob-
ally renowned fruit detective, by recogniz-
ing in her country’s Renaissance artworks
not only exceptional examples of cultural
patrimony but also hidden messages from
a bygone era of genetic abundance that can
offer clues about how to recover what was
seemingly lost.
– –
SIX CENTURIES AGO, Italy boasted hun-

dreds of varieties for every fruit, each adapt-
ed to specific ecological niches. Apple, pear
and cherry varieties across Umbria were
at room temperature for about seven months and different, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, from Venetian, Florentine
maintain their best qualities outside the fridge. And or Piedmontese varieties. At the turn of the 20th century, the country
these ungainly apples are just one variety among was home to at least 1,000 pear varieties, according to Dalla Ragione.
scores of others that Dalla Ragione, who is among Today, Italy is one of Europe’s foremost producers of pears. Yet for both
Italy’s foremost experts on tree fruits, has identi- pears and apples, a mere four varieties each now compose more than
fied as being widely cultivated in the 16th century— 70 percent of the country’s production, compared with the hundreds of
and largely gone by the 21st, as genetic diversity varieties that were common a century ago. A 2020 Atlas of Biodiversity

commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture—to softly down toward the river. It’s thick with more
which Dalla Ragione contributed—documents than 600 trees and plants encompassing 150 vari-
how dozens if not hundreds of varieties of peach- eties; the orchard boasts 43 varieties of pear alone.
es, cherries, grapes and apricots once cultivated Dalla Ragione’s desk, really a six-foot-long wooden
in Italy’s many regions have shrunk to a handful slab, is piled with books and research materials,
of uniform varieties for each fruit nationwide. including a 600-year-old book about agriculture,
The loss of those varieties isn’t just a question centuries-old reports by municipal authorities on
of lost deliciousness. It also means that we’ve the fates of various crops, and oversized pictorial
lost centuries of adaptability encoded in the books of the Renaissance masters.
genes of the fruits of yesteryear. According to “Here’s a book on Bellini,” she exclaims, flip-
Mario Marino, an agronomist working with the ping to a page that includes the famous painting
Climate Change Division of the United Nations’ often called Madonna col Bambino or sometimes
Food and Agriculture Organization, who serves Madonna della Pera (“Madonna With Child,” or
on the board of advisers for Archeologia Arborea, “Madonna of the Pear”). “But it’s not a pear—it’s
rediscovering the descendants of those old fruits an apple!” She’s often finding such mistakes.
will be crucial for Italy’s ability to withstand the Dalla Ragione identifies it as a “cow-nose” apple,
unpredictable and increasingly dramatic effects quite common 600 years ago, extremely rare to-
of climate change. day and so named because its shape recalls an
One of the few places where you can find some elongated snout. (The painting’s mistaken name
of these ancient fruits is 35 miles from the city almost certainly did not originate with Giovanni
Bellini, but rather with later art historians, likely
seeking to distinguish between the many “Ma-
donna With Child” paintings of the time.)
Dalla Ragione’s deepest connection to this
land is through her father, Livio Dalla Ragione,
born in Tuscany in 1922 and raised down the
road from here in the medieval village of Città di
Castello. After fighting in these hills as a partisan
against the fascist Mussolini government, and
then against the Nazis during the German occu-
pation of Italy, he became part of the Arte Mater-
ica movement, centered in Rome, that favored
using wood, textiles and other tactile ingredi-
ents for making art. He moved back to Umbria in
1960, bought the former monastery and turned
it into a home for his family. While teaching art
at a local university, Livio began researching the
implements and practices of rural life
in the region, which were already
beginning to disappear as in-
dustrial farms replaced local
farmers and those displaced
MISTAKEN IDENTITY farmers abandoned country
Dalla Ragione has discovered that the life and moved to the cities.
fruit in Bellini’s Madonna With Child,
sometimes known as Madonna of the Livio was a pioneer of what is
Pear, is actually a cow-nose apple. now a dynamic rural farm and
food movement in Italy—and he
of Perugia, high in the hills above the Tiber planted this precious family orchard
River, in the orchard surrounding Dalla Ragione’s with local varieties that he’d seen farmers aban-
family home. It takes some grinding of the gears don. He also founded a folk art museum that still
S CA L A / A RT R ES O U R C E , N Y (2 )
in my rented Fiat to get up the dirt road leading operates in Città di Castello.
to it. Eight centuries ago, the house was a Roman- Dalla Ragione received her undergraduate de-
esque stone church. In the 1400s, the church be- gree in agronomy from the University of Perugia
came a monastery. The living quarters now house while also studying theater and acting with various
Dalla Ragione’s kitchen and workspace. troupes. She even took courses with a teacher from
From a window, you can see the orchard, cov- a renowned clown school in Paris. She describes liv-
ering about seven and a half acres that undulate ing two lives during the 1980s—one in theaters as

APPLE CHAPEL TREE OF LIFE
A day’s harvest, on A tree in Dalla Ragi-
view in Dalla Ragi- one’s orchard bursts
one’s home, brings with cow-nose apples,
more old-school ap- like the one she spotted
ples—including rossa in Bellini’s Madonna
d’estate (“juicy, very With Child. They’re of-
sugary, crunchy,” ten mistaken for pears.
she says) and renetta
(good for cakes)—plus
fresh almonds.
a performer, the other in the fields as an agronomist.

At the time, the rise of industrial-scale farming in It-
aly and around the world was driving a rapid decline
in crop diversity, as generic seeds that could be grown
over vast areas replaced those adapted to specific re-
gions. Local fruit varieties disappeared from the fields
and the market; thousands of local breeders were
bought out or were unable to compete. By her early
30s, Dalla Ragione recognized her true passion. “I had
to decide whether to be a real actress, and go all around
the world like an actress, without roots. Instead, I saw
I needed my roots, my territory, my stories. And I left
theater and focused my life on the fruit trees.”
At the beginning, she followed her father around
as he interviewed local farmers about lost and disap-

pearing fruit varieties: “It was like an adventure for
me, a little bit of a divertissement,” she recalls. “But
nobody in those days talked about biodiversity or ge-
netic erosion.” In 1989, when she was 32, she and her
father founded Archeologia Arborea, the organiza-
tion that would serve as an umbrella for their largely
self-funded research into these lost species. Each
still had a full-time job, Livio as a teacher, Isabella
as an agronomist consulting with nearby regions on
their biodiversity and agro-ecology strategies.
Livio had combined his interests in art and farming
into a kind of improvised anthropology, and Dalla Ra-
gione says it was her father who inspired the multidis-
ciplinary approach she pursues today, combining the
tree sciences with art history, archival detective work
and even the storytelling she learned from theater,
which she says helps her communicate her findings
to students, researchers and the public. After her fa-
ther died in 2007, she says, “I continued his research,
but I give it a more scientific dimension.”
She also continued working as an agronomist on
nationwide biodiversity conservation strategies,
which included searching out the descendants of
old regional fruit varieties. In 2006, her research led
her to a palazzo, barely ten miles from her home,
that once housed the Bufalini family, major Um-
brian landowners in the 16th century. There, in a
room filled with boxes of old paper records off the
OLD MAN AND writing. One inventory listed some 65

THE PEACH
The Old Man figure varieties of fruits the Bufalinis grew
from the splendid 600 years ago, including more than
Seven Ages of Man
fresco (1412) at two dozen varieties of pears and ap-
the Palazzo Trinci, ples, with such inviting names as pera
with the peaches
that symbolize his del Duca di Cortona (a pear named
advanced years. after the duke of Cortona) and mele
incarnate di Sestino (an apple named
for its inward redness). It was a gold mine of names and de-
scriptions of plants and trees.
But Dalla Ragione soon found that digging through centu-
ries-old figures on a page could only get her so far. Then she
had a revelation that quickened her hunt for ancient fruit trees.
N P L – D E A P I CT U R E L I B R A RY / S. VA N N I N I / B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES
Inside the palazzo, she’d regularly pass stone walls hung with
paintings evoking battles, religious iconography and mythi-
cal scenes. One day, she stopped and looked more carefully at
the ceiling in the “Prometheus Room”—so-called because it
features a 16th-century fresco by Cristofano Gherardi of Pro-
metheus delivering fire to humans. Now she noticed for the
first time that the pears and apples and plums and other fruits
she had been reading about in the archive upstairs were scat-
tered throughout the scene above her head. “At this moment,
I understood the circle of connection between the documents,
second-floor loggia, or balcony, Dalla Ragione pored the frescoes and the real fruits,” she says. “I put together that
through inventories of crops owed to the family by the art was at the same period of time as the documents. For
their tenant farmers, gardeners’ reports, records me, it was an incredible connection.”
of centuries-old real-estate deals and other docu- Fruits, when she started looking at paintings, were ev-
ments, many of them in ornate 16th-century hand- erywhere. She realized that paintings were not just art, they

were evidence, and not only evidence of fruit cise in their renderings so that “the messages from
from hundreds of years ago. They were also the paintings had to arrive to everybody, rich and
evidence that the fruits growing in her own poor alike.” That lifelike precision means that Dalla
orchard—the elongated pear, the snub-nosed Ragione can tell, by the placement of a fruit’s stem,
apple, the yellowish-green plum—were prob- or its shape, or the colors of its skin, not only the
ably descendants of those rendered in the species of fruit but also the variety—that is, not only
frescoes and paintings she encountered. the difference between an apple and a pear, but the
She also came to understand how lucky she difference between one kind of apple or pear and
was to be working in Italy, in many ways the another. Later artistic movements that prized imag-
center of Renaissance painting. Before the ination over figurative accuracy don’t offer remotely
15th century, almost all European artwork was the same degree of precision.
focused on mythical or religious imagery. But In the years since her eureka moment at Palaz-
in a shift away from the formal and thematic zo Bufalini, Dalla Ragione has turned Archeologia
rigidity of the medieval period, many artists, Arborea into a nonprofit research and educational
often immersed in their own rural societies, foundation to support her scientific research, doc-
began to paint nature and its bounty with in- umenting fruit traits and the variety of environ-
creasingly devoted precision. Even more im- mental stresses trees can withstand—or cannot. In
portant, Dalla Ragione says, fruits often car- addition, Archeologia Arborea now accepts grants
ried symbolic meaning—cherries the blood from philanthropists, mostly in Italy and the United
of Christ, pears the symbol of paradise after States, and it works with scientific organizations like
death, and so on. Painters needed to be pre- the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and
the University of Perugia.
In 2017, Dalla Ragione obtained a PhD in biodiver-
A BIODIVERSITY PRIMER
The Museum of Still Life in the Villa of the sity from the University of Perugia. For her doctor-
Medici in Prato offers colorful depictions al thesis, she analyzed the genomes of hundreds of
of 17th-century Italian fruit, including
these pears and grapes rendered by pear varieties, which led to a radical discovery: Old-
Bartolomeo Bimbi. Handily for Dalla er pears, dating back to the 15th century and earli-
Ragione, every painting includes a name
for each of the varieties pictured. er, have many more alleles—meaning more genetic
diversity—than 21st-century varieties.
“That diversity,” says Lorenzo Raggi,
a researcher in agricultural genetics
and biotechnologies at the Univer-
sity of Perugia, “can translate into a
greater capacity to adapt to different
conditions.” This genetic diversity
also meant that there were huge dif-
ferences among the fruits themselves,
even those from the same roots. “One
year the trees would produce fruits of
one color, then the next year, another
color,” Dalla Ragione says. It also gave
these varieties the capacity to adapt to
shifting conditions, generation after
generation. They might not produce
A L I N A R I A R C H I V ES, F LO R E N C E / B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES (2 )
as much per tree as modern varieties,

but their traits helped them survive
new pests and changing weather con-
ditions, meaning they produced fruit
more steadily over decades and even
centuries.
Those diverse traits are on brilliant
display in the piles of multicolored
and idiosyncratically shaped pears
and apples inside what was once the
nave of the 13th-century church that
is now Dalla Ragione’s home. She calls
the room her “apple chapel,” because

it’s cold and dry enough to store fruits from her orchard for
up to a year without refrigeration. Many of them are small-
er than the fruits we’re accustomed to—slightly gnarled and
misshapen, with occasional oblongs where we’re used to
circles. Some taste tarter, others very sweet, and several are
quite mushy; she usually turns them into jams or vinegars
for her friends. But they are recognizable as pears and ap-
ples, the relatives of those we commonly encounter today.
Without chemical boosters, however, many modern varieties
“may have limited response to pests or weeds or diseases,”
says Raggi. The older fruits may not be as big or as uniform
as those today, he says, but they were selected by humans
and the environment to survive—and conserving those di-
verse characteristics is a critically important part of Dalla
Ragione’s work.
– –
THE IMPORTANCE of agricultural biodiversity, Dalla Ragione

says, can be explained with a very human metaphor—lan-
guage. She likens biodiversity on a farm to expanding a vo-
cabulary. Conventional agriculture, with its limited genetic
range, relies on a narrow vocabulary: “Industrial agriculture
created a few varieties that are very productive in very pre-
cise conditions, with a lot of chemicals and a lot of water. The
new varieties may be bigger and have more consistent color,

In order to make use of those genetic “answers,” how-
ever, they need to be rediscovered not only in paintings
or musty old feudal inventories but also in the ground.
“Biodiversity is dynamic, it cannot be preserved like
an object, like a piece of furniture,” Dalla Ragione says
one afternoon as we drive the winding country roads of
Umbria in search of fruit. “You can’t restore an ecosys-
tem by putting seeds in a refrigerator!”
Fortunately, central Italy, one of the country’s
most fertile regions, has been host to a high concen-
tration of Catholic saints: St. Benedict, St. Francis
and St. Rita all lived in Umbria. As a result, the area
is especially rich in monasteries that, Dalla Ragione
knew, had old gardens and orchards that had escaped
the farm consolidations over the past half-century
thanks to their isolated locations—and their un-
willingness to sell their land to agribusiness. (The
monasteries retain considerable autonomy from the
Vatican in how they manage their land.) So Dalla Ra-
gione began visiting the still-active monasteries and
convents where she had once walked with her father.
There, she found her long-sought trees, originally
planted centuries ago. Often untended for years, they
had aged and survived for generations. Many were
the direct descendants of the trees in Dalla Ragione’s
beloved paintings. From their branches hung abun-
dant quantities of fruit—often pockmarked and mis-
shapen, but nevertheless real and sometimes even
delicious.
In many cases, Dalla Ragione found records and
notes about the plants and trees in the gardens. “The
friars, monks and nuns had time to write,” she says.
“They documented their cultivations, what they
bought, what foods they offered to guests, every-
thing.” The modern monastic residents were curious
about her interest in old fruits and generous when she
asked to take sample cuttings back from their gardens
and orchards. “I declared immediately that I was not
there to pray!” she says, chuckling. She returned to her
orchard with cuttings from the holy gardens, three or
four each from a selection of figs, plums and pears,
which she grafted onto her own stalks.
Dalla Ragione hopes that those humble stalks, in
RESTORING THE NOBLE GARDEN turn, with their age-old resilience, will point toward a sustain-
Dalla Ragione is curating the reconstruction of the
Palazzo Bufalini orchard (above left). Inside the able future for Italian tree fruits in a changing climate. At cur-
palazzo, frescoes show quinces (left) and other fruits. rent emission levels, the average temperature in Italy, already
Dalla Ragione relies partly on a 1706 plan (above)
that details a panoply of apple and pear varieties. breaking records, is headed toward a rise of 2 degrees Celsius
or more by 2050 from its preindustrial average, according to
but they have very few genes—few words. Their genetic pat- a Europe-wide Climate Risk Atlas. Heat waves will continue
rimony is very simple. If you present the right question, they to grow hotter and last longer, while the frequency of agri-
can answer, because maybe they have four or five or maybe cultural droughts at that temperature could increase in Italy
ten words. But if you present other questions—like drought by 50 percent. Last summer foreshadowed those conditions.
or climate change or other situations—they have no words to Searing temperatures and drought devastated many farm-
answer. They can’t answer because they do not have enough ers in the area where Dalla Ragione does much of her work.
genetic variability inside to answer these questions. Old vari- Meanwhile, dangerous new fungi, diseases and pests follow
eties have a big vocabulary. They have many words to answer the heat. And the flip side of drought—the product of excess
these new questions.” evaporation levels during heat waves—can lead to intense

rains and serious floods, as occurred in Tuscany
and surrounding regions last spring.
Such extremes are bound to accelerate in
what scientists warn is a convergence between
a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis. The
two are interlinked: Biodiverse ecosystems,
enriching and bolstering to soil, are far more
resilient to extremes. But Italian biodiversity,
like that in the United States and elsewhere, is
currently in free fall. Some 42 percent of Italian
plant species in threatened environments face
a risk of extinction, according to the Conven-
tion on Biological Diversity, a global agreement
that calls for the protection of genetic resources
from further ecological degradation. The more
genetic erosion, the less we are able to respond
to those changes, says Kent Nnadozie, exec-
utive secretary of the International Treaty on
Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agricul-
ture. “The current system breeds seeds for a set
of conditions that are no longer,” he says. “The
first rain used to be a sign to till and plant. Now
it could be the first and last rain. Or the oppo-
site—too much rain. Climate variability is why
we need diverse varieties, those old, ancient
varieties.”
To that end, Dalla Ragione’s work with Ital-
ian regional commissions to boost agricultur-
al biodiversity—in Marche (which neighbors
Umbria and Tuscany), Lazio (home to the city
of Rome) and Emilia-Romagna (where you will
find Bologna)—is a response to both crises. In
that role, she studies threatened crops, collabo-
rates on ways to conserve varieties and updates
lists of regional crops. She also works with
agricoltori custodi—custodian farmers—who
receive subsidies to continue growing the old
crops, helping to select robust varieties to preserve FRUITS OF Back in Italy, Dalla Ragione is working to resur-
HER LABOR
and cultivate, and helping them tend their tradi- Dalla Ragione
rect historic gardens at several 15th- and 16th-centu-
tional orchards and gardens. picking a cow- ry villas and palazzos in Umbria and Marche. At the
nose apple,
Meanwhile, she helps others around the world framed by the Palazzo Bufalini, where she had her epiphany that
searching for their own ancient varieties. Twice a redder rossa paintings offer critical insights into disappeared
d’estate apples
year she travels to Lebanon, during flowering and in the fore- fruit varieties, I was able to see the literal fruits of
harvest times, to help resurrect local heritage cher- ground. her work. The balcony next to the archives where
ries and apricots. (“So sweet!” she marvels.) She she commenced her research overlooks trees she
was there most recently this July but had to leave planted about a dozen years ago, now flourishing
early because of rising tensions between Lebanon BYLINES with apricot, peach, apple and pear varieties de-
and Israel. In Jordan, she has consulted with the scended from the varieties that grew there during
agriculture ministry on cultivating indigenous aloe Mark Schapiro the Bufalinis’ 16th-century heyday. What she’s try-
is an investigative
vera plants, and she has helped train farmers in environmental ing to create, she says, are “living catalogs of biodi-
journalist. His
the West Bank in agro-ecology techniques for res- most recent versity in the field.”
book is Seeds of
urrecting ancient date palms. In years past, before Resistance.
Russia invaded Ukraine, she also made several re- – –
Simona Ghizzoni
search visits to the ancestral homes of the Russian previously
photographed
writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, after Smithsonian’s IN HER OWN orchard, as we walk along terraced
their estates requested her help reintroducing local June 2022 feature rows of trees lined with wildflowers and cover crops
about the real
apple varieties. story of Pinocchio. and buzzing with pollinating bumblebees and oth-

er insects, Dalla Ragione makes it clear
that bringing back agro-biodiversity
is a meticulous, tree-by-tree, fruit-by-
fruit, seed-by-seed endeavor. “It takes
patience,” she says. “It’s kind of like the
work of an ant—ants make tiny, very
small steps, but they build a kingdom.”
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Animal Tracking
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 75
Don’t Be Puzzled come with getting out into nature. Hence Tracker
Certification’s access committee, which has raised
YOU CAN FIND EIGHT ANSWERS IN THESE PAGES $25,000 to reduce barriers for participants, partic-
By Sam Ezersky ularly those from historically marginalized groups.
The group has held workshops at parks in Atlanta
1 2 3 4 5 6 5 7 8 9 10 and Baltimore for Black and Indigenous trackers
and other trackers of color, including biologists,
11 12
open-space advocates and educators. Even in these
citified spaces, Cooley said, the biodiversity “blew
my mind.” Foxes deposited their fur-filled scats;
13 14
mink left dainty prints in mud; beavers hewed
streamside trees. Tracking brought urbanites into
15 16 16
contact with hidden nature, and suggested new av-
enues for outdoor education and the preservation
17 18 19 20 of green space. “I see it as this powerful piece to
connect Black and brown people with each other
21 22 23 24 25 and the natural world, and get healthier in their
bodies and spirits,” Cooley said.
26 27 27 28 Later, I spoke with Vanessa Castle, a fisheries and
wildlife technician with the Lower Elwha Klallam
Tribe, who, after beginning to track in 2021, realized
29 30 30 31 32 33 34
it was a means of reclaiming her people’s traditional
knowledge—“a reconnection with the way that my
35 36 37
ancestors used to see the world.” She’s since men-
tored dozens of young tribal members, several of
38 39 whom have passed their own evaluations, a poten-
tial pathway to jobs in fields such as natural resource
40 41 management. “I have an obligation to the future gen-
erations of my tribe to continue teaching them those
skills that I’m learning along the way,” Castle said.
Across Down In the end, I narrowly failed my own evaluation
1 Word before weapon or 1 “Sometimes, ___ is more” (though at least I’d been right about the bobcat).
injection 2 Convention center event
7 Common conveniences in 3 God who wields a hammer
For days afterward, I was plagued by what Reyner-
gas stations 4 The Fair View ___, one of son called the “haunting miss”: the dog prints I’d
11 Strongly urge (someone) Belinda Mulrooney’s called coyote, the indistinct raccoon tracks I’d con-
12 Mouse catcher establishments in the Klondike
13 Lakota warrior extolled for his 5 Source of clues to Italy’s fused for fox. Yet my haplessness was beside the
heroism at Blue Water Renaissance-era agriculture point. I now knew that a mourning dove’s scat re-
15 Like one’s feet after a whole 6 Cell service initials
day in heels, perhaps 7 “___ way!” (“Nice job!”)
sembled a cheese Danish, that male tarantulas car-
16 Prickly desert plants 8 Small but valuable pieces of ried their sperm packets in their leg-like pedipalps,
17 Athleisure lead-in to “lemon” evidence for ecologists that rabbits ate and redigested their own pellets.
20 Home of Topeka: Abbr. 9 Tiki bar cocktail
21 Soviet spy’s grp. 10 Support for a broken bone Who could put a price on such knowledge?
24 Playful bite from a pup 14 Certain bra specs At the test’s end, our group gathered under an oak
25 Command after “Down, boy!” 18 Remove from the package,
26 Notable time period as a gift tree to debrief. McFarland reminded us of something
27 Former first lady Truman 19 Something detected by John A. that had been easy to forget, stooped in the dirt as
29 Mello ___ (rhyming drink brand) Larson’s “cardio-pneumo- we’d been: Every track, every scat, every chew mark
31 Snoozes psychogram”
35 Character in the first-ever 21 High-tech building access device was the “physical extension of an animal,” a flesh-
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day 22 Guilty of one of the seven and-blood creature. The mole tunnel had contained
Parade float (1927) deadly sins
38 Unpleasant smell 23 Item that once featured portraits an actual mole, gorging on millipedes beneath our
39 Where Leo Reuss disguised of political candidates feet; the striped skunk tracks had been left by an ac-
himself for theater work 28 Mean, mocking smile tual skunk, loping down a dirt road to fulfill its secret
40 Unit of computer memory 30 Italian banknotes before the euro
41 Bourbon is a famous one 32 Reason to see a dermatologist ends. So many beings scurrying over the land—feed-
in New Orleans 33 Window section ing, mating, killing, living—enduring everything we
34 Bit of info for number crunching
36 Sports bar fixtures humans throw at them, thriving in spite of us, leav-
See the solution on Page 90. 37 Red peg, in Battleship ing their mark upon the world.

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SMITHSONIAN NOVEMBER 2024:
Volume 55, Number 5 day have historical value and saved it.
Smithsonian (ISSN 0037-7333) publishes monthly except Jan/Feb, Apr/May, Jul/Aug and Sept/Oct and when future In 1976, the Berkeley Police Department
combined issues are published that count as two issues as indicated on the issue’s cover. Frequency subject to change donated it to the Smithsonian, where
without notice. Published by Smithsonian Enterprises, 600 Maryland Ave. S.W., Suite 6001, Washington, D.C. 20024.
Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. it sat in storage for decades. Over the
Postmaster: Send address changes to Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 8504, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8504. past five years, seven conservators have
Printed in the USA. Canadian Publication Agreement No. 40043911. Canadian return address: Asendia USA, P.O.
Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. helped to revive its motley parts for dis-
©Smithsonian Institution 2023. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. play. Some of the rubber and plastic had
Editorial offices are at MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013. Advertising and circulation offices are at 420
Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10170 (212-916-1300). become stiff and degraded. Other parts
Memberships: All subscribers to Smithsonian are members of the Smithsonian Institution. Ninety-nine percent of were fragile, grimy or missing. The pa-
the dues are designated for magazine subscriptions.
per was seriously compromised. Today,
Back Issues: To purchase a back issue, please call or email James Babcock at 212-916-1323 or babcockj@si.edu.
Back issue price is $10 (U.S. funds). though, “it doesn’t look like an old dusty
Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services we thing that nobody cares about,” says
believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive this information, please send your current mailing
label, or an exact copy, to Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 8504, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8504. Janice Stagnitto Ellis, the museum’s pa-
Subscription Service: Should you wish to change your address or order new subscriptions, you can do so by
per conservator. “It looks vital.”
writing Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 8504, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8504, by calling 1-800-766-2149
(outside of the U.S., call 1-903-636-1113,) or emailing Smithsonian@SmithsonianService.com
Answers from Page 88.
Statement of ownership, management and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of Smithsonian published monthly with com-
bined Jan/Feb, Apr/May, Jul/Aug and Sept/Oct issues by Smithsonian Enterprises, MRC 513, Washington, D.C., 20013-7012 for October 1, 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 7 8 9 10
2024. General business offices of the publisher are located at 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 2335, New York, N.Y., 10170-1845. Name and
address of publisher is Denise Elliott, MRC 513, Washington, D.C., 20013-7012. Name and address of editor is Debra Rosenberg, Smith-
L E T H A L A T M S
11 12
sonian Magazine, MRC 513, Washington, D.C., 20013-7012. Owner is Smithsonian Institution, 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W., Washington,
D.C. 20560. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds,
E X H O R T T R A P
13 14
mortgages, or other securities: None. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal
income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months. The average number of copies of each issue during the preceding
S P O T T E D T A I L
15 16 16
12 months are: a) Total number of copies 1,063,497; b) Paid Circulation (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid
Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 987,681; (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Paid distribution
S O R E C A C T I
17 18 19 20
outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales and other paid distribution outside USPS:
5,604; (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: 0; (c) Total paid distribution: 993,285. d) Free or nominal rate distribu- L U L U K A N
21 22 23 24 25
tion (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 52,674 (2) free or nominal
rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 0; (4) free or K G B N I P S I T
nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 1,807. Total free or nominal rate distribution: 54,481. Total distribution: 1,047,767. Copies 26 27 27 28
not distributed: 15,730. Total: 1,063,467. Percent paid 94.8%. Paid electronic copies: 42,086. Total paid print copies and paid electronic E R A B E S S
copies: 1,035,371. Total print distribution and paid electronic copies: 1,089,852. Percent paid (both print and electronic copies): 95%. 29 30 30 31 32 33 34
The actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date are: a) Total number of copies printed: 954,955; b) Paid Circu- Y E L L O N A P S
lation (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 906,472; (2)Mailed In-Coun- 35 36 37
ty Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Paid distribution outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, F E L I X T H E C A T
street vendors, counter sales and other paid distribution outside USPS: 5,432; (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: 38 39
0; (c) Total paid distribution: 911,904. d) Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Free or nominal rate out- O D O R V I E N N A
side-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 31,686; (2) free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) free 40 41
or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 0; (4) free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 1,807. Total B Y T E S T R E E T
free or nominal rate distribution: 33,493. Total distribution: 945,397. Copies not distributed: 9,558. Total: 954,955, Percent paid 96.5%.
Paid electronic copies: 41,284. Total paid print copies and paid electronic copies: 953,188. Total print distribution and paid electronic
copies: 986,681. Percent paid (both print and electronic copies) 96.6%. I certify that all information furnished is true and complete.
(Signed) Denise Elliott, Publisher, Smithsonian Magazine 90 SMITHSONIAN | November 2024
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YOU’VE GOT QUESTIONS. WE’VE GOT EXPERTS
dangered species; for example, adding genes to help a
species cope with rising heat or survive an infection
from an invasive pathogen. There are laws governing
this kind of work. In the U.S., modifying existing spe-
cies requires permits from federal agencies.
Robert Fleischer, head of genomics, Smithsonian’s
National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
Q: Isn’t the extra carbon dioxide in the

atmosphere helping plants grow—and
doesn’t that offset global warming?
John Schantz | Nazareth, Pennsylvania
YES, BUT ONLY up to a point. Plants need several

elements to live and grow, including carbon, which
they usually draw from the atmosphere in the form
of carbon dioxide. Rising carbon dioxide levels in
the atmosphere can give most plants a boost in
growth. Some of the extra carbon they absorb ends
up in wood or soil, where it is locked away from the
atmosphere for decades. However, climate change
also causes droughts, flooding and fires, all of which
endanger plants. What’s more, high temperatures
have been shown to stifle the chemical processes
involved in photosynthesis—for instance, hinder-
ing the enzymes that bind carbon dioxide to sugars.
So while carbon dioxide does help plants grow, the
extra carbon in the atmosphere has other effects
that may eventually outweigh the benefits.
Patrick Megonigal, senior scientist and deputy
director, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Q: Could a private citizen get hold
of a genome and use it to bring an Q: What were the earliest musical
extinct animal back to life? instruments? And were they used for
Anjali Rawal | Encinitas, California entertainment?
Andrea Smith | Portland, Oregon
DRUMS MAY HAVE been among the earliest hu-

man-made musical instruments, but they were likely
made of animal skins and wood, which do not pre-
serve very well. The oldest drum-like objects known
to date are the 5,000-year-old Folkton Drums from
HERE’S CURRENTLY no way to bring England; they were carved from chalk and may have
T an animal back from extinction been used as measuring devices rather than musical
instruments. The oldest agreed-upon musical instru-
based on genomic sequences alone.
However, some lab groups and indi- ments are flutes carved out of mammoth ivory and
viduals hope to “bring back” extinct bird bones, found in multiple sites in Germany dat-
animals—including mammals, birds ing back as far as 42,000 to 43,000 years. Another
and amphibians—by modifying the genome of an ex- possible flute from Slovenia, made from a cave bear
isting species so the animal resembles an extinct rel- femur, was dated to over 50,000 years ago and is sug-
ative and plays a similar ecological role. For instance, gested to have been made by Neanderthals. We don’t
scientists with the Revive & Restore project have pro- know how these flutes were used, but they seem to
posed using gene manipulation to create elephants Submit play a pentatonic scale, with five notes per octave.
that have the heavy coats of woolly mammoths. The your queries at Briana Pobiner, paleoanthropologist,
Smithsonianmag
same types of methods can be applied to currently en- .com/ask National Museum of Natural History
92 SMITHSONIAN | November 2024 Illustration by Tracy Walker

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