Striving to solve history's mysteries
Among the six million artifacts were items from Lewis and Clark. But records were poor: How could she find out which ones they were?
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"Objects - what they meant socially, symbolically - represent choices of Indian people," McLaughlin says. "They are the voices of those people. That's why these objects and their stories are so important."
Is there a 'mystery object' in your family? Something you'd like to know more about? Castle McLaughlin, a curator of Harvard's Peabody Museum, offers these tips:
• Find out what is the object is made of. Break it down into its component parts and research the materials: the paint or glaze; the type of wood, metal, or ceramic, etc.
• Look for objects similar to yours in local museums or on the Internet (many museums have collections online). Let's say you see a pitcher that looks like yours. The museum's pitcher is from Kentucky. Research Kentucky pottery at the library or online. Some museums offer to identify objects on certain days. Or your museum may be able to tell you whom to talk to.
• Go to flea markets and yard sales. Look for objects similar to yours and talk to their owners about what they know about them.
• Watch PBS! Particularly 'Antiques Roadshow' and 'History Detectives.'
All Peabody curator Castle McLaughlin had was the label: "Indian Necklace made of the claws of the Grizly [sic] Bear - Presented by Capt. Lewis and Clark." It was handwritten on faded paper from the 19th century. The necklace itself - extraordinarily rare and valuable - was gone. Ms. McLaughlin had looked for it for years. But another note indicated that it had been returned to the family that had donated it. McLaughlin feared it was lost forever.
She never guessed it was in a dusty box in her own museum.
The necklace, probably given to Lewis and Clark by a tribal chief, was donated to the Philadelphia Museum (the Smithsonian Institution of its day) in 1828. When the museum went bankrupt in 1843, many of its objects, including the Lewis and Clark collection, were acquired by businessman Moses Kimball for his Boston Museum.
When Kimball's heirs decided to give up the museum business, they gave their Lewis and Clark objects to the Harvard University's Peabody Museum - but kept the necklace.
A generation later, in 1941, a Kimball heir gave the necklace to the Peabody, where it was mislabeled as whalebone and sent to sit among Polynesian artifacts. There it sat, on a shelf above eye level, for 62 years.
Fast forward to December 2003: Curatorial assistants Tilly Laskey and Kara Gniewek, working on an Oceania cataloging job, came across the necklace: 38 bear claws, each a good three inches long, attached with rawhide and fur, probably from a weasel. The interns, knowing these were claws, not bone, contacted their supervisor, who told McLaughlin.
"I felt a sense of recognition," McLaughlin says about seeing the necklace for the first time. "I knew the instant I saw it, I knew that was it. It has a lot of power.... It represents the natural world; the grizzly bear that loomed so large in the psyche of people of that day." Few non-Indians had ever seen a grizzly then.
After nearly two centuries, the necklace has now been reunited with its original label.
