The First Americans Read online

  Of all the continents coming under European scrutiny, North and South America were seen as probably the last to be inhabited and the last created—as the poet John Donne put it, “that unripe side of earth.” There the mammal population had degenerated, as did Europeans who stayed too long. Some compared the natives to the fabled European wild men of the woods; in reports from the New World, Shakespeare found an inspiration for Caliban. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes was speaking about Native Americans when he wrote his famous dictum about the uncivilized, savage life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

  Given even an artist's incapacity to see these people, it is no wonder that philosophers back home happily spun a bundle of assumptions and what today we would call stereotypes into grand theories about the aboriginal Americans, such overarching schemes as “the noble savage” and the “treacherous and murdering savage,” both of which still haunt NativeAmericans, although the terms are a bit different today. We no longer have Rousseau's innocent, Edenic noble savage, given to purity of feeling as opposed to the degraded world of reason (which was a wondrous bit of condescension, no matter that it helped power the French Revolution). Instead, we have today's ecosaints, a race of people instinctually attuned to abiding on the land without leaving even the trace of a moccasin print, a race so spiritual that virtually every New Ager has linked up with a native shaman from one past life or another. On the other hand, gone are the no-good, bloodthirsty “redskins” who once marauded innocent sodbusters and did battle with John Wayne's blue-coated cavalry; we now have the no-good Indian incapable of a full day's work in his tribe's Mafia-controlled casino and instead typically found in a sodden stupor in the gutter of some squalid off-reservation town like Gallup, New Mexico. One of the greatest difficulties throughout the centuries and still today has been to look upon the Native Americans not as ciphers or metaphors for one or another fantasy but, first and finally, as human beings.

  It is little wonder, then, that when white Americans came across the most monumental works of the original inhabitants of North America, they assumed them to be the product of some other, master race long since vanished: the mound builders. For by then, whatever gossamer notions about Native Americans (or libels) the Europeans back home were spinning, most settlers on the frontiers of the New World took a dim view of the native peoples they encountered. Everyone from the lost tribes of Israel to escapees from Atlantis would be invoked to explain the mysterious monuments the colonists (and later U.S. citizens) found all over the landscape once they pushed their way across the Appalachians. There is nothing like lost civilizations and vanished races to stir the imagination.

  THE MOUND BUILDERS

  From western New York State to Nebraska, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, the land was once littered with mounds, many of them enormous in height and extent. The largest were flat-topped like the pyramids of Central America, and they all would have necessitated huge crowds of workers. They were built of vast tonnages of dirt, many with astonishinglyprecise angles, some in the form of a perfect circle. In what would become East Saint Louis, a huge metropolis seemed once to have existed along the Mississippi, in a place called Cahokia. It was some five square miles in area, with a hundred mounds grouped around central plazas. Most spectacular of the Cahokia mounds was what came to be called Monk's Mound: covering sixteen acres, it was the largest single earthwork ever built by prehistoric people in North America. A temple evidently once sat atop this mound, one hundred feet above the surrounding area and visible to the entire population. It has been estimated that this one mound called for the quarrying and piling up of more than 21 million square feet of dirt. Estimates of the resident population ran in the tens of thousands, though current estimates suggest something far less—perhaps five thousand in Cahokia's heyday, which is still a big place if one is accustomed only to the stereotype of the Native American as living in small bands of hunter-gatherers wandering around in the woods or riding over the plains. (In fact, at the time of European discovery, most natives, by far, were village or town-dwelling agriculturalists who also hunted and gathered resources from the surrounding countryside.)

  Reconstruction of Cahokia at its apogee, ca. A.D. 1150, by William R. Iseminger.

  The greatest concentration of mounds was in America's continental heart—Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. Ten thousand had been built in the Ohio Valley alone. Some were in the form of animals and one, the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, is a snake nearly a quarter of a mile long, its five-foot-high body writhing southward from a coiled tail, its gaping mouth in midgulp of an oval burial mound. It is the largest representation of a snake anywhere in the world.

  An aerial view of the Great Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio.

  Effigy mounds, such as the Great Serpent, typically had no mortuary purpose, but virtually all others were found to be the sites of burials, some astonishingly elaborate, the graves of what were clearly great leaders, filled with all manner of valuables from copper neckpieces and stone carvings to freshwater pearls in the thousands, and in some cases, especially in the southern mounds, the corpses of family members and retainers sacrificed to accompany the leader on his journey—or hers; some of the prominent people of these societies were apparently women. In sheer quantity, and inthe size of many of them, the earthen mounds nearly equaled the monumental structures of Mexico. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians and patriot boosters of North America could rejoice. Here were achievements to rival the antiquities of Europe and the grandeur of the ancient worlds of Egypt and the Middle East.

  Well, almost.

  At the very least, ancient North America was not an embarrassingly depauperate place with nothing to suggest its own glorious and mysterious past. For here certainly—and well to the north of the Aztec and Mayan ruins—was the work of a populous, highly civilized race, people with a means of making accurate measurements, people with elaborate religious ceremonials… and people who definitely could not have been the ancestors of the relatively few pathetic, seminomadic, unambitious, ignorant, often drunk savages who now—as the newcomers saw it—lived in this region. Once the French were run out of the area in the so-called French and Indian War that ended in 1763, the British view of native peoples predominated: contemporary natives were clearly incapable of the sheer sustained labor of hauling so much dirt, much less some of the complex architectural detailing of the mounds. Nor did they have any current traditions about mound construction. When asked by British colonists, the Cherokees in western North Carolina whose villages were built on mounds had essentially shrugged and said the mounds had already been present when the Cherokees had arrived.

  A fourth kind of mound appeared to be defensive in nature, and it was soon assumed that the race of master builders, whoever they were, had eventually succumbed to attacks by hordes of savages (probably coming from the north and ancestral to the American Indians), just as Rome had fallen to the swarming barbarian Huns and Visigoths. Noting a particular geographic progression (or regression)—relatively small effigy mounds in the north, conical burial mounds in the middle, and large flat burial mounds and temple platforms in the south—some would wonder if the original mound builders had moved from north to south with ever-increasing sophistication, eventually reaching Mexico, where they had discovered the use of stone for construction. Others would see Mexican master builders moving north, losing sophistication along the way. Andstill others would choose the builders from an astounding array of candidates from all over the world. The ancient human art of conjuring up astonishing tales from the sparsest of information was happily under way.

  By the time of the American Revolution, plenty of opinions existed about the mounds and their builders. The naturalist William Bartram (son of the naturalist John Bartram) made a long trek through the South and concluded, rightly, that some mounds were contemporary while others were older, even relatively ancient. Some, he thought, were temple mounds like those he saw still in use. In
1787, an Ohio traveler, Benjamin Smith Barton, suggested that the mounds had been built by Danes who had moved on to Mexico, but a decade later he changed his mind, saying that most of the mounds had probably been the work of ancestral Indians, who, he said, might well have arrived about 6,000 years ago, a time that fit well enough with most generally accepted notions of the age of the earth in the late eighteenth century.

  It should be pointed out that at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe and America, there was no such thing as the field we call archaeology. No formal method of investigating ancient sites was known, and no way of judging findings accurately existed. People who were interested in “antiquities” were what we would today call amateurs or hobbyists. At the time, the Bible, for most people, represented a true and precise history—and chronology—of humanity and the world. There was no intellectual concept by which those whom we think of as early humans could be understood. There was no sense of the extreme age of the world and very little notion of the nature of life besides the immutability of species as they had been created by God, all at once, in the manner described in the Book of Genesis. With the publication of Lyell's book between 1830 and 1833 came the distinct (and heretical) possibility that the Bible did not represent the actual chronology of the world, that the Book of Genesis should be seen more as poetry than as fact. But the European world was also on the edge of industrialization, and by the end of the 1850s it was presented with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, the first look at a human of the ice age (a gent called Neanderthal), and the astonishing revelations of Charles Darwin. With the earth's age extended radically far into the past and Darwin's theory of natural selection (published in 1859) to explain the mechanism of what some naturalists, including Darwin's grandfather, had earlierbegun to see as evolutionary processes in nature, the entire world was new. Until such concepts were in place, there was really no hypothetical framework in which such (to us) commonplace occurrences as cultural change over time could be perceived, much less analyzed. And certainly there was no methodology by which an antiquarian could examine the archaeological record and test one hypothesis or another. In short, no means of scientific reasoning existed for examining the ancient, prehistoric past. That is why Thomas Jefferson appears in this context, as in so many others, as an astoundingly astute and, in this case, precocious observer.

  Jefferson had heard most of the available theories about who had built the mounds, and in his systematic way, in 1784, he dug out a small, twelve-foot-high mound on his property near the Rivanna River in his native Virginia. He uncovered successive layers of burials, each separated by layers of gravel and stone. From this, he concluded rightly that they had been the work of the present Indians' ancestors. When the burials had occurred, however, “was a matter of doubt.” Historians of science have said that this was “the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology” and that it anticipated the methods of modern archaeology by more than a century. In other words, Jefferson was, however distantly, one of the fathers of modern archaeology (a field that benefited, like most others, from multiple sirings), just as it has been said that for his careful reporting of native lifestyles Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas was a “father” of ethnography.

  In any event, Jefferson's pioneering methodology—the first excavation designed not to recover artifacts but to solve an archaeological question— was sufficiently ahead of his time that it had virtually no real impact on subsequent work for at least another century. Nor, it seems, did his circular written ten or so years later to the other members of the American Philosophical Society, newly formed in the young nation's intellectual capital, Philadelphia. In it he called for accurate surveys of the mounds and their contents by way of cross-section trenching, tree-ring counts, the measuring of the length, breadth, and height of walls, and the recording of the nature of any stonework. (It could be argued that it was not Philadelphia but Jefferson's estate that was the nation's intellectual capital.)

  In particular, Jefferson's levelheaded approach to the mound builders did not resonate in the mind of the American public. Other notables of his time entertained more far-out possibilities: Ben Franklin, for example,thought that the mounds might be the work of de Soto and his expedition through the South in the 1540s. Others, including DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York, picked the Vikings, holding that a band had arrived at some point and made their mound-building way south and west, eventually reaching Mexico, where they turned into the Toltecs. Others, hearing a Delaware Indian epic from myth time, concluded that the mounds had to have been the work of the Cherokees, whether they remembered building the mounds or not.

  Many of the notables of the new nation formed the American Antiquarian Society in Boston in 1812, modeled on European versions, and in 1820 it published its first Transaction, which included a long piece entitled “Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States.” The author was Caleb Atwater, postmaster of Circleville, a village in Ohio. Atwater had grown up among the Ohio mounds, and Circleville, founded in 1806, was laid out around two large mounds. Seeing such structures beginning to disappear under the increasing onslaught of settlers bent on clearing land for farms, he trekked throughout the state, mapping and describing many of its mounds. Here and there he found bits and scraps of metal, copper items, and while he reported these finds soberly and scoffed at other reporters who took off on great flights of fancy based on looking at one or two mounds, he inadvertently gave comfort to those who wished to exaggerate or spin romantic yarns. Some later writers would take his reports of a few metal objects and turn them into proof of a high civilization capable of significant metallurgical feats. (In fact, in a few places in the upper Midwest, native copper occurred in large natural globs that were cold-worked into decorative pieces and traded widely.)

  Atwater was an assiduous amateur. He carefully described the mounds he encountered and attempted to sort American antiquities into three kinds: materials made by the natives, those of European origin that had been traded to the aboriginals, and those of the lost race of mound builders, who, he postulated, had to have been far more sophisticated than the ancestors of the living Native Americans. Who had they been?

  Like all deeply religious Westerners, Atwater believed that all humanity had originated from Noah's landing at Mount Ararat, spreading from there. He believed as well that savage Asian hunters had come across theBering Strait and became the American Indians but that, prior to their arrival, gentle shepherds and farmers had emigrated to North America by the same route, after trekking through eastern Asia and Siberia from India. Atwater found a three-headed ceramic pot in a Tennessee mound that he took to represent the three main Hindu gods—“Brahma, Vishnoo, and Siva.” Probably, he guessed, the mound builders had migrated here via Alaska as early as “the days of Abraham and Lot” and worked their way slowly south, increasing in sophistication and winding up in Mexico.

  While his explanation of the mounds was wide of the mark, his survey was methodical and sober and is still of value, and for this work he was called by some the first American archaeologist. But of course, the area of interest that would one day become archaeology was still a long way from casting off the attractions of myth and grappling with fact. Indeed, it would not be until well after the Civil War that anything approaching a scientific archaeology would begin to come into being. Several other sciences—in particular, geology—would have to reach a certain maturity first.

  Making up the dates, routes, and identities of the mound builders soon became a minor industry; poets and novelists leapt in, playing on the popular fantasies of the time. The first fictional account of the mound builders' downfall saw the light of day as early as 1795. Later, Sarah Hale, a New Hampshire poet, portrayed the master builders as the descendants of two peripatetic, star-crossed Phoenician lovers. In 1832, in a poem titled “The Plains,” the dreary New England poet William Cullen Bryant wrote of the “race, that long has passed away” who had built the mounds, heaping up d
irt on their dead till…

  The red man came—

  The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,

  And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

  The solitude of centuries untold

  Has settled where they dwelt …

  And so on.

  Oddly prescient, though not for any reasoning we would today think of as scientific, an 1839 novel by Cornelius Mathews, Behemoth: ALegend of the Mound-Builders, had woolly mammoths alive at the same time as themound people. (Their coexistence would be a much-gnawed bone of contention in scientific circles in the decades to come.) In what seems for all the world like the forerunner of the Godzilla movies, Mathews pictured an ancient North America full of cities that were almost destroyed by a particularly enormous woolly mammoth called Behemoth, civilization being saved at the eleventh hour by a hero who figured out how to kill the monster.

  In the 1830s, Josiah Priest, a forerunner of Immanuel Velikovsky, created a wondrous tale of utter nonsense, calling it by the learned-sounding title American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West. It sold a huge number of copies for its time, some 22,000. Priest had the continent from the Rockies to the Alleghenies populated by many millions, with large clashing armies reminiscent of Alexander the Great's, battle horns sounding, banners aflutter—an epic predecessor of the Cecil B. De Mille approach to the past. Some of the mounds, Priest said, had been built prior to the biblical Deluge, and North America was where Noah's Ark had come to rest once the waters subsided. That the mounds were not the work of mere Indians was obvious to Priest, though he could not choose who the mound builders were from an extensive list of candidates he reviewed, including Egyptians, Greeks, Israelites, Scandinavians, Scots, Chinese, and Polynesians.

  One contemporary of Priest's who was fascinated by such tales was Joseph Smith, who grew up near Palmyra, New York, and later, in a nearby cave, allegedly came upon the golden tablets that, once transcribed, became the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon describes several ancient diasporas of people from the Middle East to North America, including one in about 600 B.C.: just before Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, some Jews crossed the ocean to North America and began building great cities on top of mounds. Then a split occurred, creating the Nephites (the good guys) and the Lamanites (who became dirty and wild). God punished these godless savages, turning their skin a dark red. But then the Nephites themselves became corrupted, and, to punish them, God let the Lamanites overrun the Nephite mound cities. In the year A.D. 401, near Palmyra, the last of the Nephites bit the dust but one: a priest named Mormon lived long enough to write all this history down on golden tablets. Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, Mormon missionaries explained to Native Americans (and blacks) that if they joined the Church of Latter-Day Saints, their skin would gradually lighten.