354 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



natives from that place sold these to dealers in Nome is 

 the basis for the statement, by the dealers, that the ivory 

 comes from King Island, but it appears most likely that the 

 tusks were obtained from the Alaskan mainland, which is 

 visited each summer by these islanders, and carried to their 

 settlement for the purposes of manufacture and thence to 

 Nome for sale." 



It is not only in the frozen north, in Alaska and Siberia, 

 that the ivory of the extinct mammoth is well enough 

 preserved to render it available as an industrial material 

 to-day, but even in England an elephant tusk found on the 

 coast of Yorkshire near Bridlington was in such an excellent 

 state of preservation that a good part of it was utilized 

 by an ivory turner for the making of boxes. A fragment 

 of this Yorkshire tusk was found on comparison to differ 

 but little in appearance or condition from those obtained in 

 or at the foot of the cliffs at Eschscholtz Bay, Alaska.* 



The persistent, circumstantial, and apparently trustworthy 

 reports that the body of a mammoth still in a good state of 

 preservation had been discovered in Alaska induced the 

 sending of an expedition in 1907, by the American Museum 

 of Natural History; in 1908 a second attempt was made in 

 the same field. These expeditions, planned by Prof. Henry 

 Fairfield Osborn and Director H. C. Bumpus, were carried 

 out by Dr. L. S. Quackenbush, who has supplied a ver^^ full 

 account of the results attained. f As it was soon demon- 

 strated that the newspaper reports of the finding of an entire 

 mammoth were devoid of foundation, the efforts of the 

 explorer were more especially directed to the historic Esch- 



*Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. XLIX, Washington, 1905, A. G. Maddern, 

 "Smithsonian Exploration in Alaska in 1904," p. 82, citing Doctor Buckland's notes of an 

 expedition of 1828. 



t'TS'otes on Alaskan Mammoth Expeditions of 1907 and 1908," by L. S. Quackenbush; 

 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XXVI, pp. 87-130; New York, 

 March 24, 1909. 



