Baboonery on the Boulders

Written By: Stuart Ferguson - Shakespeare and Company | Issue: April - 2022 | Photograph By: Susan Renfro

A destiny that ranges from Belgium to the short-lived Mexican Empire of Maximilian Habsburg and then to the mountains of North Georgia is strange enough. But throw in Buddhism and baboons and you’ve got the adventurous Felix Oswald.

Oswald (1845-1906) was born in Namur but went to Mexico in 1865 as a doctor in the Belgian Legion supporting Maximilian’s doomed regime. (His consort was the Belgian princess Carlota; catch the trailer for the 1939’s Juarez! on YouTube, with Bette Davis chewing scenery as the mad empress). 

It all collapsed in 1867, and Maximilian met his end in front of a firing squad (see Edouard Manet’s famous painting), “shot like a highway robber” according to a fellow physician quoted by Oswald in his 1880 Summerlands: Sketches of Mexico and Central America, which recounts Oswald’s subsequent travels in remotest Mexico and Guatemala. The author was interested in the flora, fauna, ancient ruins, and modern characters encountered enroute as he dispensed medical treatment.

Oswald, who came to the U.S. in 1873, was worried even then about deforestation and climate change, and advocated for preservation of old-growth lands. He wrote treatises in favor of a vegetarian diet and fasting and against vaccination. He worked at a standing desk and believed Christianity an offshoot of Buddhism (The Secret of the East is that book). He would have fit right in now.

I think that by the time Summerlands was published, Oswald (according to a 1963 article about Tallulah Falls in the Georgia Historical Quarterly) was probably living in William Rembert’s old house overlooking the junction of the Tallulah and Chattooga rivers, mentioned in last month’s column. There he composed articles on natural history and health for Popular Science, Harper’s Young People, and Lippincott’s, with occasional travel to the West Indies to gather animals for U.S. and European zoos.  

Oswald was particularly fond of monkeys, returning with new varieties (Bonnet Macaques, Southern Pig-Tailed Macaques, Chacma, and Cutch Baboons) for himself, which were given free range of his house. Actually, it’s clear from his writings that Dr. Oswald was obsessed with monkeys, which he labeled “fourhanders,” there’s no mention of a Mrs. Oswald and only rarely of a child; contemporaries referred to him as a hermit who cooked over an open fire. 

In 1887 one of his baboons escaped and according to Oswald “caused an excitement as if the chained beast of the Apocalypse had broken loose” as it spent weeks roaming the gorge.

I bet. 

Could this account for some of the legendary Bigfoot sightings in our mountains?