Trying to Find an Eighteenth-Century Eagle and Bear at the Huntington

Scholars go to archives to find things and find out things about things. I went to the Huntington to find, among other things, traces of an eagle and a bear that a group of Indigenous people from North America brought to London in 1734. The eagle and bear offer evidence about Indigenous understandings of how the early American world worked and how they could respond to its challenges.  Trying to find the eagle and the bear, though, uncovered evidence of something else: the critical importance of the Huntington’s scholarly community.

I’m a historian of early America, especially of early Indigenous peoples, and most especially of the ancestors of today’s Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, people who in the eighteenth century lived in the Creek homelands that make up large swaths of Georgia and Alabama. 

In 1734, a Creek headman named Tomochichi and eight other Creeks from the village of Yamacraw went to London.  Tomochichi had welcomed James Oglethorpe and his colonists when they arrived in Georgia in 1732.  While in London, the Yamacraws received the red-carpet treatment: two meetings with King George II, a private audience with the queen and her children, and tours of London’s many wonders from late June to late October. 

Before returning home across the Atlantic, Tomochichi’s British hosts asked him to pose for the artist William Verelst, who produced two portraits.  One features Tomochichi with his arm around his nephew, Tooanahowi, who is holding an eagle.  The second shows Tomochichi and his followers meeting the Georgia Trustees. This picture shows the same eagle along with a bear cub. 

I’m interested in the Creeks’ voyage because I want to know more about how Indigenous people in the eighteenth century approached a world that had come to include not simply themselves and their Indigenous, African, and European neighbors, but also powerful peoples who lived on the other side of the world. What did it mean for these Creeks to travel across the ocean and interact with the people they met on the other side? What did they decide to bring with them? What did they want to bring home?

The things that they cared enough about to transport across an ocean point us to toward their priorities.  As a researcher who all too often has to rely on European-produced documents about Indigenous people who the Europeans either did not understand or did not respect, the things that the Creeks chose to bring to London are critically important to my project.  At the top of my list are the bear and eagle featured in Verelst’s pictures. Both creatures were powerfully situated within Creek traditions.  No Creek would bring them across the Atlantic on a whim.

Did the Creeks actually bring a bear and an eagle to London, though? Verelst’s pictures suggest they did. Likewise, I found a London newspaper which reported that “Tooanahowi, nephew to the Indian chief, waited on his royal highness the duke at Kensington, and presented him the bear and eagle which he brought over.”  Of course, London newspapers then as now were hardly bastions of the unvarnished truth.  Indeed, another newspaper reported that Tooanahowi gave “his Royal Highness the Duke … the Body of a Flying Horse, which died in the Voyage from Georgia.” But even Verelst’s portraits aren’t exactly rock-solid evidence of the bear and the eagle’s presence in London because British artists regularly depicted Indigenous visitors surrounded by images–tropical foliage and wild animals, for example–meant to mark them as exotic and embedded in the natural world, even if those images had nothing to do with the individuals pictured. 

Take, for example, the work of William’s father, John Verelst, a successful artist in his own right. John painted a set of four portraits of Haudenosaunee leaders who came to London from New York to meet Queen Anne in 1710. In each portrait, John made sure to include an animal.

In this case, those animal figures did have a connection to the headmen–they represent clan totems–but the Haudenosaunee hadn’t actually brought the animals with them, which may explain why an accomplished artist like John drew such an unconvincing wolf and bear (his son did much better with his representations of the eagle and the bear). My research in the Huntington’s archives suggest that none of the several dozen parties of Indigenous diplomats from North America who visited London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought live animals along with them. So, if Tomochichi and his party of Yamacraw Creeks did bring a live eagle and bear to London, that alone would be noteworthy. How to find out? 

I found the answer at the Huntington, but not because the Huntington’s collections include either the remains of those animals or documents that describe them. This is not, in the end, a story of archival discovery. Instead, this is a story about the vibrant research possibilities at a place like the Huntington, which is chockablock with books, unpublished manuscripts, images, material objects, maps, plants, and lots and lots of experts in lots and lots of disciplines and fields. It turns out that the Huntington’s people have been every bit as important to my research as the Huntington’s collections. 

At lunch one day during my fellowship with a mixed group of historians of science, British historians, and specialists in Indigenous history, I described my project and what I was struggling with, and the historians of science at the table said, “Well, of course you’ve started with Sir Hans Sloane’s papers.” I had not. I knew of Sloane, who was a leading scientist, doctor, and public intellectual in eighteenth-century London and whose collections became the foundation of the British Museum. He treated one of the Creeks who came down with smallpox and thus was on my “People to Look Into Eventually” list. 

Hans Sloane collected relationships with people who could send him stuff almost as avidly as he collected stuff, and his papers have been the object of intense archival and curatorial efforts, culminating in a series of online databases that allow anyone to search through his handwritten catalogues. While I wouldn’t find the animals’ bodies themselves, I might find evidence that the bear and the eagle were not just a figment of an artist’s imagination. 

And so, I went to the to the Sloane Lab’s amazing database, which synthesizes information from 65,000 records referencing 200,000 objects from Sloane’s collections. I played around with search terms like “eagle” and “bear,” which delivered too many hits, and settled on “eagle + Georgia” and “bear + Georgia.” Shazam. There they were: the eagle and the bear given by the Creeks to the Duke of Cumberland. 

Birds Book, Entry 821: “The skin of the bald Eagle from Georgia given me by this Royall highnesse the Duke of Cumberland to whom it was presented by Tomo Chiche the Indian King.”

Quadrupeds Book, Entry 1657: “The kidney of a small bear from Georgia given to me by his Royal Highnesse the Duke of Cumberland. It appeard healthy & dy’d suddenly & hald no blood in one of the ventricles of the heart.”

I am still trying to figure out what the eagle and the bear tell me about the goals of the Creeks’ trip, the worldviews that lay behind those goals, and how those worldviews shaped their experiences in London. For now, though, I’ll settle for emphasizing that although none of what I found was housed in the Huntington’s collections, none of the things I’ve discovered would have been possible without the Huntington and the diverse community of scholars it draws. 

The Huntington’s generous long-term fellowship program brings over 150 scholars to its archives every year and they join the nearly 2,000 readers who come to the library on their own from around the country and world. The fields and disciplines represented by these readers are as broad and deep as the collections themselves. At many archives, someone with my interests would never sit down for lunch with British historians and historians of science. It’s not that we avoid each other; it’s that they’re not usually at my archives, and I’m not usually at theirs. But at the Huntington, the only thing unusual about that lunch was that it didn’t also include an art historian, a literary critic, a medievalist, a poet, an artist, and a botanical specialist. The scholarly community that results from the range of collections and the expertise of the library’s archivists and curators is critical to the work that so many of us are able to accomplish while in residence there. 

In my case, that community led me to evidence that the Creeks did bring a bear and an eagle to London.  As I try to figure out what that means in the context of eighteenth-century Indigenous North America, I’m grappling with something else that I learned thanks to the colleagues who sent me to Sloane’s records: Tooanahowi really did give the Duke of Cumberland the body of a flying horse.  But that’s a story for another time.