Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900) – Father of
Modern Flintknapping in North America
(A version of this paper appeared in CHIPS magazine, Volume 20, #4, 2008.)
Richard Michael Gramly, North Andover, MA
Among boxes of papers and copies of off-printed publications in the library of Richard Johnston, I discovered a photocopy of a typescript about a famous anthropologist, Frank Hamilton Cushing. The typescript was prepared from an undated, multi-part article that appeared in the Medina Tribune – an upstate New York newspaper that is now out of business. The typist (Mrs. Stanley (Katherine) Vanderlaan of Albion, New York) may have copied the newspaper article more than 50 years ago. Likely, installments of the article were published some years after Cushing’s death in 1900, and perhaps as late as 1923.
The author of the newspaper article is George Kennan, a friend and admirer of Frank’s who witnessed his developing interest in Indian lore and archaeology. Frank Hamilton Cushing and George Kennan resided near Medina, western New York State. The Cushing home still stands, but the location and condition of the Kennan residence(s) are unknown to me. George Kennan (1845-1924), relative of the famous diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005), was a world traveler who spent many years in Russia and Siberia. He was an accomplished lecturer; audiences for his speaking engagements are supposed to have exceeded 1,000,000.
Kennan’s sketch of the life of Frank Hamilton Cushing is forceful, compelling us to know more about him and Frank. Readers will be happy to learn that both men were prolific writers and left rich legacies of publications, and Cushing has been the subject of many biographers. However, Frank Hamilton Cushing’s experiments in flintknapping, when he was just a young teen-ager, are nowhere discussed in detail. His precocity is all the more amazing when we realize that he was self-taught.
Frank Hamilton Cushing
By George Kennan, world traveler, writer & lecturer
A few of the older citizens of Medina will doubtless remember Dr. Thomas Cushing, a former resident of Northeast, Erie Co., Pa., who came to western New York and bought a farm near Barre Center about sixty years ago. When I first saw him, ten or twelve years later, he was driving a yoke of oxen through Main Street, Medina, and I noticed only that he was barefooted and carelessly if not uncouthly dressed. I cannot now
remember when I first made his acquaintance, but it must have been soon after I came to
Medina to live the first time in 1871. He was then practicing medicine here, and his son, Frank, was a boy about fourteen years in age.
I soon discovered that Dr. Cushing, although eccentric in behavior and dress, was an interesting man who had a good mind and great originality and independence of thought. He did not impress me as cultured, or highly educated, but he was generally well informed, and it was a pleasure to talk with him, because he was always sure to look at a subject in some new, fresh, or original way. He had a strong anti-theological bias, but aside from that he was open-minded, and liked to discuss a question on its merits, regardless of his own preconceptions or mine. Most talkers – or at least most disputants – want to convince you of something – to make you look at the subject from their point of view. Dr. Cushing never did. He seemed to assume, at the outset, that he was as likely to be wrong as I, and that only by a fair, unprejudiced comparison of opinions could we find out what the truth really was. He always allowed me to make my statement of a case without interruption; but at intervals, as I proceeded, he would hold up one finger and say: “Stick a pin there.” Sometimes, before I finished, my argument was as full of pins as an old-fashioned pin cushion; but he never forgot where every pin was, and when I ended, he would taken them all out, in orderly sequence, and state his objections. I liked that method of discussion, because it gave me a chance to say all I wanted to say, without being jerked up by a contradiction, or diverted from my main argument by the lugging in of a side question. So we had many good talks about science, in which I was interested, and speculative philosophy, which was his particular hobby.
In social matters Dr. Cushing was emphatically non-conformist. He would not do a single thing merely because other people did, and custom and fashion he despised. If a social observance, or an article of dress, did not commend itself to his reason or his common sense, he would have nothing whatever to do with it. I cannot remember ever to have seen him wearing a starched collar, and his shoes were made to correspond exactly, in size and outline, with the imprint of his wet foot on the floor. he would not permit any of his children to call him “father” or “papa” but insisted that they address him as “Cushing.” Neither would he allow any of his family to use the expressions: “Please” or “thank-you” or “excuse me” or “I am much obliged” or “I beg your pardon,” etc. His objection to these phrases apparently was that they carried in implication of inferiority, or subservience. He also objected, I remember, to the words “a good deal” in the sense of quantity, simply because “deal” was used in card playing and had no reference to quantity. Other people might say “a good deal” if they chose; but he would not merely because they did.
In these and in many other respects his eccentricity was based on a feeling of independence and a hatred of ceremony, conventionality, and precedent. He would do all things that seemed to him reasonable, but he would not do an irrational thing even if he was a minority of one against a hundred millions. In a society where all conformed to certain types, fashions or standards, without much regard to reason, this eccentricity seemed to me at least refreshing.
In matters of religion, Dr. Cushing was an agnostic. Whether he ever had any religious training or not I don’t know, but if he had, he drifted far away from it long before I knew him. He certainly gave no religious instruction to his children. Frank,
however, was a thoughtful boy, and when he first came into direct contact with death at the age of fourteen or fifteen, he said to his father one day, “Cushing, when a man dies, does he die altogether?” His father replied brusquely, “I don’t know a thing about it; neither does anyone else; but if a man lives again, he doesn’t go to hell.” I seldom discussed a religious question with him, but when I did, it seemed to me that his agnosticism was the result of solitary thinking, rather than the reading of skeptical books.
Literature and science he knew only moderately well, but he did have a fair acquaintance with biology, and even in those early days he was a firm believer not only in evolution, but in the animal origin of man. I remember his bringing to me one day an embryo of one of the higher mammals, to show us how, in its prenatal stages, it passed through the traditional forms of animal life, from the lower to the higher, and thus illustrated Darwin’s theory of the origin and development of species.
In one respect Dr. Cushing was singularly blind. He never noticed the dawning of a rare intelligence in his son, Frank, and never seemed to realize, for a moment, that the boy, notwithstanding his backwardness in arithmetic, was destined to have a distinguished scientific career, and to become not only a great archaeologist, but one of the most skillful interpreters of aboriginal life that America ever produced. I knew little at that time of archaeology, but I could see that the boy had genius, and I encouraged him in every way I could, sharing his enthusiasm and participating in his experiments, while I wondered how he had acquired the sympathetic understanding of primitive man which, even in his boyhood, was one of his salient characteristics.
In my next column I shall give some recollections of Frank’s early life and an outline of his scientific career.
Frank Hamilton Cushing was born July 22, 1857, in the little village of Northeast, Pennsylvania, where his father and mother then lived. He was, at his birth a mere mite of humanity, weighing only a pound and a half., and it seemed doubtful, at first, whether so small an infant could possibly survive. For more than a year he was kept constantly on a pillow and made hardly any growth at all, but he finally got a start and gradually developed into a normal but frail and delicate boy.
In the year 1860, when he was three years of age, his parents moved to Barre Center, N.Y. where they bought a farm. There Frank spent the greater part of his boyhood. His early education seems to have been very meager, but he did learn to read and write, and among his first recollections was the finding among the medical books in his father’s library of a big unabridged dictionary, which he seized as a prize and thereafter studied incessantly, carrying it around from place to place on his head. His physical weakness and distaste for boisterous companionship of other children drove him more and more into solitude, and he found his keenest pleasure in the fields and woods. As he wandered, he talked to the trees and rocks and to the moon, and he was fascinated by the solemn mystery of the night. He fairly worshipped the forest trees and, conceiving the idea of having one that he could call his own, he bought one at a very small price from his cousin – not a tree that he could dig up and carry away, but a big one in the woods, under whose shade he could dream, talk, sing, and imitate the sounds the he heard from birds and beasts. This was his trysting place with Nature.
His interest in archaeological research began when he was about ten years old, and it was first aroused by an incident that he afterward described in the following words:
“When I was a boy of less than ten years, my father’s man while plowing one
day, picked up and threw to me across the furrows a little blue flint arrowpoint
saying – ‘The Indians made that; it is one of their arrowheads.’ I took it up
fearfully, wonderingly, in my hands. It was small, cold, shining and sharp –
perfect in shape. Nothing had ever aroused my interest so much. That little arrow-
point decided the purpose and calling of my whole life. I treasured it on the lid of
an old blue chest in my little bedroom, until the cover of that chest was over-filled
with others like it. When nearly fourteen years of age, I discovered in the woods
south of Medina, N. Y., an ancient Indian fort. I built a hut there and used to go
there and remain days at a time, digging for relics when the sun shone, and, at night,
in the light of the campfire, studying by experiment how the more curious of the
relics had been made and used.”
It was just after the discovery of this old Indian fort that I made Frank’s acquaintance. He was ten or twelve years younger than I, but his mind was unusually mature for a boy of his age; his temperament was congenial and sympathetic, and we had many tastes and interests in common. I care for Nature as much as he did, and fifteen years earlier I had spent many nights in the woods, from sheer love of it, just as he had. Then, too, at that particular time, I happened to be reading Tyler’s Early History of Mankind, which had just been published. From this book I learned the fact, which was then new to me, that man had not been created “a little lower than angels” in a Garden of Eden, but had struggled up there from the depths of savagery through his own exertions, gradually learning how to talk, how to provide himself with clothing, how to make a fire, and how to chip and fashion the flint that he used for implements and weapons. This line of study gave me a deep interest in the “relics” that Frank was digging up in the old Indian fort.
He did not then have much book knowledge of archaeology, and the information contained in Tyler’s Primitive Culture and Early History of Mankind was as new to him as it was to me. he absorbed it with eager interest, and especially the part that related to prehistoric methods of making fire. He had never before heard of the fire-drill, but when I showed him a picture of it in Tyler’s book, he made one for himself, and we tried it together one day in my brother’s house on the corner of Center Street and West Avenue, where I was then living. We charred the wood and filled the house with smoke, but we were not able to produce a flame. Frank, however, persisted and by changing his materials, finally succeeded in getting a blaze, not only with the fire-drill, but with two suitable pieces of wood briskly rubbed together. It was a long time before he could get a flame by merely rubbing two sticks together, but Tyler and Darwin had done it, and that encouraged him to persevere until he finally discovered suitable kinds of wood. He wanted also to make a fire as the Malays did, by compressing air with a piston in a tight cylinder, but he could not get or make the necessary tube.
About that time I became interested in the origin of the solar system as outlined in the famous Nebular Hypothesis of Laplace, and of course I talked that over with both Dr. Cushing and Frank. It seemed to us plausible, but we did not know enough of physics to come to any definite conclusion with regard to it. A little later, however, a Belgian physicist named Plateau was said to have proved – or at least illustrated – the theory of Laplace, by rotating a globe of oil in a mixture of alcohol and water of the same specific
gravity. The sphere of oil, it was said, assumed an oblate form, and then, as the speed of rotation increased, threw off an equatorial ring, like the ring of Saturn, which afterwards broke up into a number of smaller globes, corresponding to the satellites of Jupiter.
This seemed to Frank too fascinating an experiment to go untried. He had no money at that time, except a little that he had earned by picking beans, but he invested most of it in a pint of sweet oil and a quart or two of alcohol, brought the liquids to my brother’s house one day and asked me to help him to try the experiment. My brother’s wife, who had been nearly smoked out of the house by our fire-drill experiment, and who was now asked to furnish a kettle for our nebular-hypothesis experiment, thought that we were headed straight for a lunatic asylum; but she brought the kettle and watched with wondering curiosity, the progress of our experiment. We had little difficulty in making the globe of oil float in the mixture of alcohol and water; but when we inserted an axis and began to turn it, we found that we could not get the necessary speed of rotation without disrupting the whole nebula. We fussed with it a large part of one afternoon, but finally had to give it up.
Frank’s way of finding things out was by personal experiment. He took the materials that prehistoric man had, and then, without using any modern tools or instruments, endeavored to reproduce the arrow heads, fabrics, and earthenware utensils that he found in the old Indian fort. Years afterward, when he was Vice President of the Section of Anthropology in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he described his method of investigation, as follows:
“If I would study any old lost art, I must make myself the artisan of it – must, by
examining its products, learn to see and to feel the conditions under which they were
produced and the needs they supplied and satisfied. Then, rigidly adhering to those
conclusions, and limited by the resources that the first artisans had, I must strive, as
ignorantly and anxiously as they did, to reproduce – not imitate – the things that they
made. I have virtually the same hands, the same physique, and generally and funda-
mentally the same activial and mental functions that men had in ages gone by, no
matter how remote. If, then, I dominate myself with their needs, surround myself
with their material conditions, and aid to do as they did, the chances are I shall learn
precisely as they learned, rediscovering what they discovered precisely as they
discovered it. Thus I shall reproduce an art in all its stages; see how it began, grew,
and developed into and affected other arts and things.”
In this way, while I was associated with Frank in Medina, he learned how to work flint, make baskets, and bake pottery, just as the unknown inhabitants of the old Indian fort did hundreds of years ago. He did not merely imitate the things that they made – he reproduced them so perfectly, if they had been living, they could not have told their products from his.
Perhaps his greatest achievement, while I was in close association with his activities, was his rediscovery of the art of shaping flint arrow heads with an old tooth-brush handle – an art that had been lost for unnumbered centuries. But I must postpone an account of this until next week.