美国国家公共电台 NPR Smithsonian Solves 150-Year-Old Mystery Death Of Collector And Puts Bones On Display

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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Let's turn now to a mystery that has taken scientists more than 150 years to solve. It involves the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and a skeleton. NPR's Scott Greenstone has the story.

SCOTT GREENSTONE, BYLINE¹: In 1852, when the Smithsonian Institution was only 6 years old and trying to build its collection, curators started receiving specimens² of frogs and birds from a teenager in Illinois. That teenager's name was Robert Kennicott.

GENE³ HUNT: And he basically collected things that are in all of our departments - botany, vertebrate zoology⁴, even paleobiology. He collected some fossils in there. And so he sort of pulls together all the different departments in our museum instead of one person.

GREENSTONE: That's Gene Hunt, a curator and paleontologist at the Smithsonian. Robert Kennicott's travels took him as far west as Alaska. On one of those Alaska trips in 1866, Kennicott left camp early and didn't come back for breakfast. His colleagues went to look for him.

DOUG OWSLEY: He was laying on the shoreline of the Yukon River, the broad brim of his hat was resting against his forehead. One of the things that they noticed is that there was foaming⁵ around the mouth.

GREENSTONE: Doug Owsley is a forensic⁶ anthropologist⁷ at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

OWSLEY: He carried a vial of strychnine for dispatching small animals he might want to preserve and collect, but that wasn't with him. So it was hypothesized that he'd taken that small vial and had thrown it into the river after he had taken a fatal dose.

GREENSTONE: That story started to make its way into the history books, but it didn't make sense to the people who knew Kennicott or studied his life.

STEVE SWANSON: I think of them as a whirlwind.

GREENSTONE: Steve Swanson is one of those people. He's director of the Grove⁸ National Historic Landmark⁹ in Illinois, the site where Kennicott grew up.

SWANSON: He'd come into a room, he'd never sit down and he would tell his whole story. He'd be moving and gesturing all the time.

GREENSTONE: Suicide just didn't fit with the stories of Kennicott's vivacious¹⁰ personality. Here's Harrison Kennicott, one of Kennicott's descendants.

HARRISON KENNICOTT: Yeah. It wasn't the kind of end of the story that anyone would want to hear about their ancestors.

GREENSTONE: The family and Steve Swanson wondered if there was a way to find out what really happened. Swanson asked a team at the Smithsonian to dig up Kennicott's body. The team analyzed¹¹ Kennicott's hair, his bones, his tissue, even digging into his childhood records. Doug Owsley was on that team. Here's what they found.

OWSLEY: This is not a death by suicide. This is actually a natural organic heart disease problem.

GREENSTONE: Mystery solved. But Robert Kennicott's story isn't over, and in a way, he's now been resurrected. Steve Swanson just saw him.

SWANSON: And I thought to myself, God, that's right. Kennicott, God bless him, has come back.

GREENSTONE: Robert Kennicott's bones are now on display at a new exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, the place he loved so much. Scott Greenstone, NPR News.