The first European explorers and settlers to set foot in North America during the 15th and 16th centuries found many large conical hills dotting the landscape of certain regions. During Hernando De Soto’s expedition across what is today the southeastern United States, he and his men passed by many of these and believed them to be nothing more than hills, but others he saw in the midst of populous native cities, with temples and the houses of chiefs built atop them, and he understood them to be manmade. By the time of French and English exploration and settlement, after De Soto’s expedition had decimated indigenous populations by introducing European disease, the cities too had disappeared, leaving only the earthen mounds, which looked to many an untrained eye like natural features of the landscape. Eventually, though, it became common knowledge that these were actually tumuli, or burial mounds, akin to the barrows of the Old World, and they were frequently destroyed by farmers seeking to level their fields, or by treasure-hunters who never found the riches they dreamed of within, just skeletons and artifacts that would only be of interest to antiquarians. Before the Revolutionary War, the consensus among the educated and scientifically-minded was that, of course, they had been built by the tribes of Native Americans who had first been encountered in the New World and who still remained there, in constant conflict with white settlers, but gradually, this belief came to be replaced by the idea that Native Americans, whom they considered “savages,” simply did not have the wherewithal to build such monuments. Rather, they must have been the work of a predecessor race, a superior breed of people more like Europeans and thus probably white, who had been wiped out by the native peoples they believed to be so barbarous. This myth of a lost race of mound-builders would breed countless theories of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact, as did the question of the origin of Native American peoples, and eventually, it would be enshrined in a uniquely American religion. It seems to have started with the vivid imagination of a Congregationalist preacher named Solomon Spalding, who encountered theories about the Old-World origins of a Mound Builder race in college at Dartmouth. After giving up preaching, he lived first in Western New York, before moving to Ohio, both regions with numerous ancient mounds, about which locals and visiting antiquarians told many stories and shared many theories. Eventually, Spalding shared his own, very publicly, telling many an acquaintance about a historical romance, or fiction, that he was writing, and sharing various drafts of it with whoever wanted to read it. The principal conceit of his story was that it was a translation of an ancient scroll found in a burial mound, which revealed the hidden history of the Mound Builder race. His manuscript would never be published, but, as some testimony reveals, it may have been taken from a printer’s office and copied by a young Baptist minister named Sidney Rigdon. After that, a young burial mound treasure-hunter in Western New York named Joseph Smith began claiming that an angel had revealed to him the location of a book of gold plates buried within a mound, which once translated by Smith, likewise told the story of the lost Mound Builder race. The fact that, later the same year that Smith published The Book of Mormon, Sidney Rigdon and several members of his congregation in Ohio would be converted to the new religion, and Rigdon would become Smith’s chief lieutenant, has led many to suspect that Rigdon planted the seeds of this new religion by secretly providing Solomon Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith for use as a model. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, the entire basis of Mormonism, a religion claiming nearly 17 million converts today, remains that the ancient Mound Builders of America were actually a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel who found their way to the New World. According to the Book of Mormon, Native Americans too are descended from these Lost Tribes, but are derived from a separate tribe that engaged in idolatry and therefore were cursed with dark skin and descended into savagery, destroying the light-skinned Mound Builder tribe. This is the core of a quintessentially American myth, that the impressive ancient earthworks of our land were not constructed by the ancestors of the Native Americans we know, but rather that Native American peoples savagely wiped out this noble and white antecedent race. It is a myth that reveals the foundational racism that our country was built on, and that, despite having long been irrefutably debunked, survives today, in the dogma of the Latter-Day Saints, in the deceptive pseudohistorical work of several influential authors, and among the thickets of false claims blithely made online.

A depiction of Joseph Smith, who in his youth had been a treasure hunter, excavating a mound after he had founded a religion on the idea of a lost Mound Builder race.

The subject of this episode is one for which I have laid an extensive foundation. Many topics that have long been of interest to me, and that I have written about, in the podcast and in my historical fiction, are closely related to the myth of a lost Mound Building race in ancient America. Most recently, obviously, my series on giants ties directly into it, as 19th century claims of uncovering enormous skeletons in Native American burial mounds were encouraged by the idea that Native Americans could not have created such gigantic earthworks, and that instead they had been constructed by a mythical lost race in antiquity. In fact, as I mentioned briefly, Aaron Wright of Conneaut, Ohio, who is said to have claimed that he found a giant skull that fit over his head like a helmet, actually knew Solomon Spalding and gave testimony regarding the similarity of Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. The claims about giant remains in Conneaut mounds were certainly one among the many stories about Mound Builders that inspired Spalding, and probably, by extension, Mormonism. If you want to learn more about the relationship between Mound Builder legends and treasure-hunting and Mormonism, including a depiction of a likely scenario for how the Book of Mormon was composed and what influenced its composition, I wrote a historical novel all about it, which I researched and wrote over the course of a decade. Some of the subject matter relevant to both Mormonism and the Mound Builder myth I discussed at length last year in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, and I followed up that series with a survey of the many inscribed stone frauds that have been perpetrated to support the pre-Columbian transoceanic contact claims and, more specifically, the supposed Hebraic origins of Native Americans, a few of which I also dramatized in fiction. In fact, this story, of the quintessentially American myth of a lost Mound Builder race, even corresponds with the myth of an Aryan race, which I devoted most of an episode to discussing in my three-part series on Nazi Occultism years ago. In the late 18th century, an English linguist in British-controlled India named William Jones, remarking on the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek and unable to conceive that something of value might have been contributed to mankind by a people of color, came to the baseless conclusion that an unknown white race had first brought this Proto-Indo-European language to India, and had since “degenerated” through racial admixture with the dark-skinned native peoples of India. This, of course, was the birth of a doctrine that would drive Nazi racial theories more than a hundred years later in Germany, and that survives today, sadly thriving in the dark dens and bastions of White Nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, neo-Confederates, the Christian Identity movement, and the Alt-Right. But long before it inspired these groups, it inspired the white inhabitants of a newly-independent United States of America to likewise imagine that there had once been a white predecessor race in their country as well, one quite superior to the Native Americans with whom they were locked in a perennial struggle for possession of these ancient lands.

Just as there were many theories about the racial heritage of Native American peoples, many and varied were the pet theories about the origins of the Mound Builder race that, by the mid-19th century, were believed by most Americans to have preceded them. Reflecting this connection to the myth of an Aryan race that was popularized by scholars in British India, some theories suggested the Mound Builders had been “Hindoos.” Of course, the term “Hindus” actually refers to a specific religious group, but these Mound Builder claims used it more generally to mean supposed ancient immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, likely meaning the mythical Aryan race posited at the time. It is ironic that these theorists refused to believe that the peoples they wrongly called “Indians” were responsible for the mounds, preferring instead to credit peoples more accurately called “Indians.” James McCulloh’s Researches on America, for example, suggested that the ancient Asian ancestors of Native Americans who crossed into the Americas via the land bridge at Beringia were more specifically from India, and that they had been trapped here by the sinking of Atlantis. Likewise, John Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” a series of letters published in Western Review, perceived similarities between the myths of Native Americans and the cultures of India, and though Judeo-Christian tradition had nothing to do with either, he believed the Bible provided insight into the construction of mounds in America, suggesting they had been further attempts to build to the sky after the fall of the Tower of Babel. Both men actually suggested that, though descended from “Hindoos,” it was indeed Native Americans who had built the mound—but not the native peoples of North America, whom they agreed were incapable of such feats. Rather, they argued it had been those indigenous to Mexico, the so-called Toltec peoples, who had been known to build impressive stone pyramids in Central America. This notion that the Toltec or Aztec Mesoamerican cultures actually originated as the Mound Builders before moving southward was quite popular, and it retained the critical element that the Native American tribes of the day were inferior, could not of built the mounds themselves, and likely drove the superior mound-building culture southward with their violent depredations.

Painting of Mound Builder Myth proponent Caleb Atwater.

The arguments of McCulloh and Clifford were further promoted in 1820 by Caleb Atwater, in his Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. Close listeners to the preceding series on giants may recall the antiquarian Atwater had been excavating mounds in Conneaut, Ohio, and had declared that the skeletons there were very small, effectively refuting the claims that local man Aaron Wright had found giant skeletons in Conneaut’s tumuli. Atwater’s work borrowed heavily from John Clifford, and Clifford’s partner, French polymath Constantine Rafinesque, took umbrage, afterward engaging in a lifelong feud with Atwater, whose theory of Native American origins he vehemently opposed, so much so that, taking a cue from Joseph Smith, he would eventually resort to perpetrating a found manuscript hoax of his own to convince the world of his more traditional view of the Asiatic origins of Native Americans, a fraud I plan to discuss further in a patron exclusive episode. But attempting to disabuse the intellectual elite of their quickly multiplying historical fantasies was a losing battle. The Hindu/Toltec theory was only one among a plethora of popular notions about who the lost Mound Builders had been, and most of them were popularized by the work of one man, Josiah Priest, an undereducated leatherworker who started his writing career in 1825 publishing a work, The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed, that pieced together the work of other writers, including Ethan Smith, whose work View of the Hebrews had popularized the notion that Native Americans were actually Jews from the Lost Tribes of Israel. But in Priest’s later 1833 work, American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West, he attempted to synthesize numerous competing theories about the origins of the Mound Builders. No longer were they merely lost Israelites, but also Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Norwegians, the Chinese and the Welsh. To give an example of his arguments, let’s look at the last group, the Welsh. Priest raises the Welsh myth of Prince Madoc, who was said to have sailed to America in the 12th century, and he shares certain claims about Native American tribes that some believed, without convincing evidence, could be of Welsh extraction. This legend had formerly been used by Queen Elizabeth to assert a claim over the new world, but the legend itself only appeared after Columbus’s voyage, in poetry, seemingly adapted from medieval tales such as the legendary voyage of the Celt, Brendan the Navigator. This is a good example of the unreliability of the claims of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact that were folded into the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, which Josiah Priest gathered and attempted to stitch together in his work, whose subtitle describes well the claims of this myth generally: “Being an Exhibition of the Evidence that an Ancient Population of Partially Civilized Nations, Differing Entirely from Those of the Present Indians, Peopled America Many Centuries before Its Discovery By Columbus, and Inquiries into Their Origin, with a Copious Description of Many of Their Stupendous Works Now in Ruins, with Conjectures Concerning What May Have Become of Them.” By this time, theories about Mound Builders had moved from a highly debated topic among an intellectual elite to a fashionable issue for discussion among less educated folk, who were Josiah Priest’s readership, and the notion of a lost Mound Builder race, whatever their origin, had proven entirely more popular.

That wasn’t always the case. In fact, prior to the Revolution, it was common for those who took an interest in mounds to logically assume they were the work of the only known residents of North America. In fact, as detailed in one of my principal sources, the exhaustively researched The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race” by Jason Colavito, a founding father and one of probably the earliest scientific investigators of mounds, Thomas Jefferson, strongly believed that Native Americans had built these tumuli. He had good reason to believe it, since he had several times seen local Native Americans make pilgrimages to a mound on his property known as Indian Grave. Later in life, he made a study of the country’s tumuli, noting the difference between temple platform mounds that had been observed by the Spanish and burial mounds like the one on his property, and in order to answer questions of whether these were cemeteries used over generations or mass graves used in the aftermath of battle, he undertook a cautious and systematic excavation of Indian Grave. In doing so, as Colavito notes, he essentially invented the practices of modern archaeology, in stark contrast to the haphazard and destructive excavations of antiquaries of the day. Jefferson’s study, which presumed as an undisputable given that all such mounds were the work of “Aboriginal Indians,” would be spread far and wide, and in fact would end up reproduced in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1797 to 1823. However, the encyclopedia placed Jefferson’s description in its section on barrows, tacitly comparing this practice with Old World funerary customs and thereby contributing to the growth of the myth that they had been constructed by some culture other than that of Native Americans.

Depiction of a cross-sectional mound excavation like that which Thomas Jefferson pioneered.

This implicit suggestion in the Encyclopedia Britannica was still something of an outlier view in the 1780s, but it came to be the view of Daniel Webster, of Webster’s Dictionary fame, who accepted Jefferson’s conclusions about Native Americans being responsible for smaller burial mounds but insisted that larger mounds and temple platforms must have been the work of Spaniards, a common enough claim at the time, or of ancient Celtic immigrants, given their similarity to European barrows. But such a view was certainly not commonly accepted yet and was even controversial. One who took exception to Webster’s claims was Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, a great American patriot called “Conqueror of the Old Northwest” for his role in winning the Northwest Territory from the British in the Revolutionary War. Clark had seen many a mound in that region and scoffed at the idea that De Soto’s expeditionary forces could possibly have constructed them during the few years of their inland exploration. Moreover, in contradiction to a central tenet of the Mound Builder Myth, that extant Native Americans had no knowledge of who had built the mounds, Clark informed Webster that, in his communications with leaders of the Kaskaskia and Cahokia tribes, they explicitly told him that the mounds had been built by their ancestors, in a time when they had been far more populous and gathered in “large towns,” specifically indicating that mounds were not only burial grounds and temple platforms, but also served as the location of the “palace” of a tribe’s leader, which supports our modern understanding of the uses of some mounds. Again, in 1803, the Reverend Dr. James Madison of the American Philosophical Society argued that the mounds were the work of Native Americans, but he was countered a couple years afterward by Unitarian minister and Harvard librarian Thaddeus Harris, who argued that Native Americans simply were not ingenious enough to accomplish such works, taking instead the view, which would become so popular, that they were the work of a Mexican native culture. So we see at the turn of the 19th century the myth in its infancy, still resisted by the rational and scientific-minded, but it was not long before it exploded, making this fiction into consensus reality.

The growth of the myth was helped early on by the claim that another Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, took a view opposite that of Thomas Jefferson. According to Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French consul who claimed to have travelled in America with him, Ben Franklin scoffed at the notion of an Asiatic origin of Native Americans, preferring the notion that Inuit peoples had immigrated to the continent from Scandinavia and the tribes of the American South from Mexico. Writing in 1801, Crèvecoeur says Franklin likened burial mounds to European barrows and insisted, like others, that Native Americans had no knowledge of their construction, which of course was blatantly false, as Clark had already shown and as other evidence which I will later review further shows. Crèvecoeur writes that Franklin believed the Mound Builder “much further advanced in civilization than our Indians,” and looked forward to a time “[w]hen the population of the United States shall have spread over every part of that vast and beautiful region,” believing that “posterity, aided by new discoveries, may then perhaps form more satisfactory conjectures.” As Jason Colavito astutely discerns, this grasping after some grand lost history does indeed seem to represent a desire for the creation of a history for America that could rival the storied pasts of European nations, but more than that, these words about spreading across the continent reflect the growing desire for westward expansion, a tendency that would find its apotheosis, later that century, in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In reality, Crèvecoeur had entirely fabricated the remarks of Benjamin Franklin, plagiarizing and adapting the words of others and placing them into the Founding Father’s mouth. Franklin actually believed the unsupportable argument that Spaniards had built the mounds of North America. We know this to be false, since the chronicles of Spanish explorers actually record their expeditions’ encounters with native cities and make specific mention of mounds. Nevertheless, the remarks Crèvecoeur falsely attributed to Franklin would later be reprinted, devoid of context, in an encyclopedia and would be read and believed by many.

Portrait of Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, literary hoaxer and plagiarist.

While Franklin’s sentiments on this topic may have been falsified, other prominent politicians of the day evinced genuine belief in the Mound Builder myth. In 1811, DeWitt Clinton, Mayor of New York City, Lieutenant Governor of the state and soon-to-be presidential candidate, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society in which he stated that the mounds were not temple platforms or burial places but military fortifications built by a lost race that had been destroyed in a race war by extant Native Americans, and he suggested that any native peoples who claimed they were the work of their ancestors were simply trying to take credit for feats their people did not actually accomplish. Years later, after acceding to the governorship, Clinton refined his claims to argue that this lost Mound Builder race was in fact the Scythians, which, as you may recall from my episode about the Tartaria delusion, was a vague racial designation applied to all peoples residing north of the Black Sea and east of Europe. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson devoted much of his State of the Union report to promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, stating, “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” And in 1837, future president William Henry Harrison addressed the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, stating that an ancient people, ancestors of the Aztecs of Mexico, had originated within the boundaries of the U.S. and built the “stupendous” earthen mounds here before fleeing “from the face of a tyrant, and the oppressions of unfeeling taskmasters,” suggesting the Mound Builders “had been made to yield to a more numerous…people…. Forced to fly before a new swarm from some northern or southern hive.” Jackson was a Democrat, and Harrison a Whig, but in this point there was broad bipartisan agreement. Indeed, both men had distinguished themselves in the American Indian Wars, which still raged and would continue to the end of the century. And here we approach the real heart of darkness within the Mound Builder myth: that it was a tool of propaganda used to justify their subjugation of Native American tribes.
In case you weren’t paying attention in your high school history class or your Survey of American history course in college, or in the likely event that your curriculum gave this aspect of American history short shrift, allow me to highlight it here. From the colonial period, through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, the United States was in a sporadic but near constant state of war with Native American tribes. These are typically better known by the names of individual conflicts with specific tribes or regions, such as the Cherokee-American Wars or Chickamauga Wars, the Northwest Indian War, Tecumseh’s War, in which William Henry Harrison was intimately involved, and the Creek and Seminole Wars, fought ruthlessly by General Andrew Jackson. Then, during his Presidency, with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Jackson, with Congress’s approval, used the full power of the U.S. government to forcibly relocate Native American tribes to land promised them beyond the Mississippi, an unfathomably destructive displacement involving concentration camps and death marches and precipitating further conflicts, such as the Second Seminole War. Among the numerous tribes forced to take the “Trail of Tears,” the Choctaw, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole, historians estimate as many as 15,000 perished from diseases like cholera and dysentery. Those who survived would see their treaties broken once again as white settlers continued to press westward and settle the frontier lands that had been promised to them, triggering battles like Little Bighorn, and massacres like Wounded Knee. Surviving tribes would find themselves hemmed into reservations, and see their children taken and indoctrinated in draconic reeducation camps they called schools. The terrible irony is that Native American peoples had built impressive and populous cities and had established healthy trade relations across a vast and prosperous culture that was laid low by European disease and massacre, reducing their cities to abandoned mounds and their peoples to nomadic warrior tribes. Yet the pale-faced interloper had the audacity to tell them that those cities hadn’t been built by such as they, that some superior race had constructed those cities, and that they deserved to be driven from their lands and hunted to extinction because they had done the same to the builders of those cities—their cities! It is difficult to find a more appropriate word for our treatment of Native American peoples than “genocide.” Indeed, our push westward for more land to settle and our concomitant annihilation of the Native Americans that stood in our way would eventually inspire Hitler and the Nazis in their push for lebensraum, and the race myths they used to justify genocide were not unlike our own.

As belief in the myth of a lost Mound Builder race became the political dogma of the U.S. government during Indian Removal and thus became common among the public, it gradually came to be considered empirical truth even by the scientific community, thus entering textbooks and furthering its propagation. During the 1840s, the most ambitious survey of these earthworks, excavating some 200 mounds, was undertaken between 1845 and 1847 by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, and their report, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, ended up being the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution. In it, they draw the conclusion that, since the earthworks themselves and some artwork found within was supposedly “immeasurably beyond anything which the North American Indians are known to produce, even to this day,” the mounds must have been the work of some superior race, likely related to Central or South American civilizations. With this work’s flawed conjecture, the myth was for several decades enshrined as unassailable science, and in 1847, we see the first example of a textbook, History of the United States of America, Designed for Schools, promulgating the falsehood. A quarter century later, the myth was still going strong in history primers like that written by George Quackenbos, and even in grammar texts, like that of John Jacob Anderson. One of the most ambitious history publications of the 1870s, the mostly cribbed and ghost written 39-volume history of eastern North America by Hubert Howe Bancroft, further disseminated the myth. Among the evidence leveraged by many of these scientists, historians, and textbook compilers were a variety of hoaxes that had been perpetrated with the express purpose of providing evidence for the lost race hypothesis. One was The Traditions of De-Coo-Dah, a book written by antiquarian and Mound Builder myth believer William Pidgeon, published in 1852, in which he dubiously claimed that a mysterious old Native American man had entrusted him with the secret truth about the Scandinavian origin of the ancient Mound Builders. Likewise, in 1859, one Nelson Lee falsely claimed to have been a captive of the Comanche and to have been told by a Chief Rolling Thunder about a race of ten-foot white men who had built the ancient earthworks. Most of the fraudulent evidence for the myth came in the form of inscribed stone hoaxes, though, most of which I previously discussed in my episode “Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories” and some of which I dramatized in fiction that I released in patron exclusive audio productions. These include Dighton Rock, the Grave Creek Stone, The Newark Holy Stones, the Bat Creek inscription, and the Michigan Relics. There was one such inscribed stone fraud which I mentioned only in passing at the time, though, which I think illustrates well the false evidence leveraged by writers promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race during these years, and I will tell its story here, intertwined as it is with the final scientific repudiation of the myth.

Illustration of the fictional De-Coo-Dah

In 1877, a Lutheran minister named Jacob Gass who spoke only German fluently and thus preached principally to German immigrants, made a seemingly astounding discovery during some of the mound explorations on a farm near Davenport, Iowa, that he had undertaken out of a great interest in antiquities. At the time, the most pressing questions, the resolution of which would make any local scientific academy world famous, were, of course, the identity of the mysterious Mound Building race, and also whether man existed contemporaneously with the mastodon. Astonishingly, Gass pulled inscribed tablets out of the mound that seemed to conveniently resolve both of these mysteries. First, they appeared to bear written language, alphabetic signs that thus proved the ancient existence of a culture separate from that of known Native Americans, who never developed a syllabary until the Cherokee created a writing system in 1821. The presence of writing was common among inscribed stone frauds, of course, but the Davenport Tablets went further. With illustrations, it depicted the earthworks of the Mound Builders being used as altars for human sacrifice. Another illustration depicts a mastodon or elephant, handily answering the question of whether that animal lived simultaneously with the Mound Builders. The plate was further found with some pipes carved into the same elephantine shape. And lastly, a separate tablet appeared to depict astrological symbols and the makings of a calendar, firing further speculation about the Old World origins of these mound-building people. The Davenport Tablets made Gass and the Davenport Academy fantastically famous, and numerous scholars supported their authenticity, citing these artifacts and their questionable translations of the characters inscribed thereon as proof that the Mound Builders were descended from Noah after the Flood, or that they were Hittites, or whatever pet theory they wanted to spread. Eventually, though, some scholars expressed doubt, most notably Cyrus Thomas, the new head of archaeology for the Smithsonian Institution who would go on to finally destroy the Mound Builder myth in academia. He pointed out the ludicrous coincidence of these items conveniently answering all the most popular questions of the day, all being found by the same man. He pointed out that Gass’s own descriptions of the find indicated that the burial place where he found the items appeared disturbed, with bones scattered, unlike the orderly burials with complete skeletons observed elsewhere at the same site, suggesting some intrusive and more recent burial during which the tablets may have been planted. And finally, he cited rumors that Gass had been involved in the discovery of several fraudulent artifacts before. The controversy did not die easily, but almost a hundred years later, in 1970, University of Iowa professor Marshall McKusick appears to have solved the mystery, demonstrating that a conspiracy of men had planted the artifacts, which they had carved from slate roof shingles stolen from a local brothel, and planted them as a prank on Reverend Gass, whom they called a “windjammer and a liar.” When the sham items suddenly became valuable because scientific academies wanted to buy them, though, they ended up covering up their fraud, in many cases with the assistance of the academics who so yearned for the artifacts to be genuine!

This demonstrates how thoroughly the myth of a lost Mound Builder race had taken hold of not just the public but scholars as well by the 1880s, when, as it happened, the Smithsonian and its Bureau of Ethnology had come under the leadership of John Wesley Powell, who strongly, and correctly, doubted the myth. Such was the pressure from the government that the Bureau served that Powell at first had to appoint a believer in the Mound Builder myth to head up their investigation of earthworks, but thankfully, Powell found reason to fire him and hire Cyrus Thomas instead, knowing full well that Thomas would not shy from refuting the myth. After nearly a decade of systematic research as the principal archaeologist in the Bureau’s Mound Exploration Division, Cyrus Thomas published his 700-page Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, in which he methodically disproved the myth of a lost Mound Builder race and demonstrated that they were, indeed, the work of the ancestors of known Native American peoples. He unceremoniously demolished the supposed evidence of inscribed stones, showing them to be frauds, and he denied the claims that Native American culture was too undeveloped to have organized such civilizations. Evidence provided by De Soto’s chronicler reveals, after all, that at the time of first European contact, many Native Americans lived in populous walled cities that demonstrated large-scale agricultural cultivation. Thomas further refuted the claim that Native Americans had no knowledge of who had constructed the earthworks and had never been seen to build such mounds themselves, citing specific historical accounts of both. He further disproved the claim that metal artifacts discovered in mounds revealed metallurgical skills that Native Americans had never been seen to possess, revealing that these objects had been made from copper native to Michigan, requiring no metallurgy, and since such copper artifacts were discovered even at a great distance from Michigan, it just served as further evidence of the sophistication of Native American civilization prior to European contact, as they must have had established trade networks from Michigan all the way down to Florida. Cyrus Thomas’s final conclusion that “the theory which attributes these works to the Indians [was] the correct one” reverberated through the scientific community. No scholars worth their salt would ever again make such fools of themselves as to resurrect the myth of the Mound Builders.

Cyrus Thomas, the man who disproved the myth of a lost race of Mound Builders.

Unfortunately, such a sea change in academic thought does not always filter down to public opinion, and as Jason Colavito shows in his thorough work, the popular press continued publishing books that promoted the myth long after Cyrus Thomas had decimated it in his report, just as newspapers continued to publish giant hoaxes that fed into it. The myth seemed to disappear during the middle of the 20th century, but in the late 1960s, the myth was folded into the growing UFO myth when Erich von Däniken published his book positing the visitation of ancient astronauts. Suddenly the American earthworks were not just the work of a lost white race, or of giants, but of aliens. Anybody, it seems, but Native Americans. Other fringe pseudohistorians, Most notably Graham Hancock, have since taken up Däniken’s torch, and broadcast and cable television have been some of the worst purveyors of this nonsense, producing slick and sensationalist specials on the topic. The History Channel is perhaps the party guiltiest of propping up this long-disproven racist myth in series like Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed. Meanwhile, on the Internet, promoted by mystic wackos and conspiracy theorists who believe the Smithsonian is involved in covering up the truth, the Mound Builder myth thrives, co-opted and supported, unsurprisingly, by White Nationalists who appreciate its claims of superior white antecedents. Even as recently as 2019, Graham Hancock published a bestselling volume titled America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, in which he perpetuates a mythical connection between Native American earthworks and the lost continent of Atlantis. So as we have seen with countless topics, even if an idea has long been debunked, it seems there will always be a market for frauds, hoaxes, and myths, even when, at their dark heart, they represent an evil and destructive ideology.

The Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race

Follow and Support Us!