The First Americans Read online

  Even with perfervid American imaginations at their most creative, more systematic observations were beginning to be made. By 1845, the geologist and explorer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft had made himself expert in Native American languages and folklore and would later be considered a major figure in the earliest beginnings of American anthropology. Before his work on the mounds, he was already a man of many accomplishments, which included finding the source of the Mississippi River in Itasca Lake, Minnesota, and serving as the superintendent of Indian affairs in Michigan, where he married an Ojibway woman (and signed a treaty by which the Ojibways ceded most of northern Michigan to the United States).

  Finding some stone tubes in mounds along the Ohio River, Schoolcraft concluded that the mound builders might have been early astronomers and were perhaps of a race different from the Indians of the time. But six years later, in 1851, when he began publishing his six-volume work, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, he wrote, “There is little to sustain the belief that these ancient works are due to tribes of more fixed and exalted traits of civilization, far less to a people of an expatriated type of civilization, of either an Asiatic or European origin, as several popular writers very vaguely, and with little severity of investigation, imagined.” (Later, Schoolcraft produced Algic Researches, which became the basis of Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha, which wrenched the historical character Hiawatha out of the Iroquois country and plopped him into the Great Lakes.)

  Meanwhile, more than a decade before Schoolcraft's first volume appeared, a doctor (whom some suggest as being the father of American physical anthropology), Samuel G. Morton of Philadelphia, had amassed a substantial collection of skulls from around the world, including some from native Ohio tribes and some from the mounds. From a systematic analysis that consisted of making ten detailed measurements of each skull, he determined that the mound builders and modern Native Americans were all of the same race. Like Jefferson's and William Bartram's earlier observations, Morton's findings were easily ignored by believers in a separate, “higher” race. After all, Morton's opinion was based on a mere eight mound-builder skulls, an awfully small sample, and who (it was asked)was to say that they weren't in fact modern Indian skulls that had inadvertently been buried in old mounds?

  No less a force than the Smithsonian Institution, in nearly its first public act, played into the hands of the “higher race” believers. Schoolcraft, along with former Treasury secretary and then linguist and ethnographer Albert Gallatin and others at the recently founded American Ethnological Society, decided in 1845 that a full-scale survey of the mounds was called for. Gallatin and later-to-be-U.S.-president William Henry Harrison disagreed with Schoolcraft on the identity of the mound builders, seeing them as a “lost race.” By way of resolving the issue, as well as cataloguing and preserving the now fast-vanishing mounds, the society eventually hired a journalist and politician for the job, Ephraim George Squier of Chillicothe, Ohio. With a fellow townsman and physician, Edwin H. Davis, Squier proceeded to open some two hundred mounds and about a hundred earth-work enclosures between 1845 and 1847, surveying them and creating excellent contour maps of them as well.

  Squier tried to put a date on the mounds; at Fort Hill in Highland County, Ohio, he counted the rings on a huge old chestnut tree that grew on top of the mound, counting some four hundred, and estimated the mound's age at perhaps a thousand years. (Squier was not the first to use tree-ring dating. In 1788, the minister Manasseh Cutler used the growth rings of trees to arrive at the conclusion that a mound under study in Marietta, Ohio, dated at least as far back as the fourteenth century and maybe earlier, evidently becoming the first student of prehistory ever to use this dating technique, now called dendrochronology—another of archaeology's countless sires.)

  Squier prepared a three-hundred-page manuscript, the publication of which was well beyond the funds of the fledgling American Ethnological Society. So he applied to the newly founded Smithsonian Institution, brought into existence in August 1846 thanks to a $500,000 bequest from James Smithson, an obscure British mineralogist and the bastard son of the Duke of Northumberland, to the United States to create “an establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.”

  The Smithsonian's first leader, Secretary Joseph Henry, a renowned physicist, had planned a publication series but not necessarily on Indians.In fact, even as the now-famous Smithsonian “castle,” designed by Romantic architect James Renwick, was getting under way, it was not at all clear what such an institution should be—a museum, a library, an observatory, a university? Anyway, once Henry was presented with Squier's work, he agreed to make it the Smithsonian's first publication in the series known as Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Called Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the 1848 volume instantly became a key-stone of American archaeology, still valuable as a record of the mounds as they appeared in 1847 (and no longer do, many having been lost to one or another depredation, mostly cleared away by farming).

  Describing those mounds that had clearly served as fortifications, Squier said they showed a great deal of military sophistication, “a degree of knowledge much superior to that known to have been possessed by the hunter tribes of North America.” Going on to discuss what he took to be sacred enclosures, he called attention to the engineering skills needed to build circular structures a mile in circumference, octagons, and other intricate forms.

  As to who had built the vast flat-topped temple and burial mounds in the South, Squier had little to say, but of the burial mounds of the Ohio Valley, he asserted, noting the sophisticated pottery found in many of them, that it far exceeded “anything of which the existing tribes of Indians are known to be capable.” The copper and other ornaments found in the mounds were, once again, superior to the “clumsy and ungraceful” work of the existing tribes, so the mound builders must have been a more civilized race than the American Indians. He concluded his report by stating that the mound builders had surely been very numerous, in the millions, and of necessity had been agriculturalists—a conclusion that Albert Gal-latin had reached earlier. Who they had been and where they had gone, however, were admittedly beyond Squier's ability to answer.

  Squier would go on to a diplomatic career in Honduras and Peru, where, in his spare time, he explored and wrote up numerous prehistoric sites and antiquities. In 1856, less than a decade after Squier's work on the North American mounds appeared, Samuel F. Haven, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, wrote the eighth of the Smithsonian Contributions (since Squier's, three others had been devoted at least in part tothe mounds). This bulletin, based on a review of the relevant literature about the mounds rather than on-site inspection, expressed the view that the North American mounds were really not all that advanced compared to the magnificent structures of Mexico and farther south. They were un-accompanied by roads, bridges, stone structures, signs of metallurgy or astronomy—in short, no signs of an extraordinary civilization, nothing that the natives wouldn't have been perfectly equal to. By denigrating the mounds themselves (however accurately), Haven could damn the Native Americans with faint praise. Yes, he was saying, the Indians' ancestors had built the mounds, but what of it?

  Even with its change of heart, the Smithsonian's impact on the public view of the mound builders remained slight. A self-proclaimed trader with Indians, William Pidgeon, soon published a long and allegedly historical account of the mound builders, based on information he received from an elderly native named De-coo-dah, who explained that he was descended from an ancient race known as the Elk People (who were perhaps of Danish extraction). It was the Elk People who had built the northern mounds, De-coo-dah said, while Mexicans had built the southern ones. The two groups had met midway, fought, and exhausted each other to the point that they had been easy prey to the hordes of red Indians swarming out of Asia. Not until 1886 were Pidgeon and his Elk People fully discredited, by a
surveyor named T. H. Lewis, who, among other things, proved that Pidgeon had failed to visit most of the sites he had written about. Lewis referred to De-coo-dah and all the rest as “modern myths, which have never had any objective existence; and that, consequently, the ancient history of the volume is of no more account than that of the Lost Tribes in the Book of Mormon.”

  Never mind. Popular accounts still held the American fancy after the years of the American Civil War and would continue to do so well into the twentieth century, while scientific archaeology was in the process of being born. Then as now, Americans felt free to make of science whatever they wished, picking and choosing which findings they liked and rejecting others. In the same vein, modern-day Creationists reject evolution and, with it, most of physics and chemistry but have their biological myopia healed using surgical lasers, which could not have come into being without thescience they so righteously reject. From accepted science combined with what we call pseudoscience, people felt free, then as now, to come up with whatever explanations they desired. In any event, the eons of geological time that had been postulated by Lyell and made popular in the work of Charles Darwin came as good news to many of those who wanted to believe in a higher race of mound builders: it provided a conveniently long period of time that could have elapsed between the end of the lost race and the arrival of the red man. At the same time, skeletons were turning up from places such as Egypt that were clearly at least 2,500 years old—and they were almost perfectly preserved. The fact that the skeletons found in the North American mounds were typically in a state of considerable decay also suggested that they were very ancient indeed—older than the pharaohs!—particularly to people unmindful of the effects of moisture on corpses.

  A prominent scientist of the time added fuel to the fires in the hearts of the proponents of separate races. In 1873, J. W. Foster, president of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, published Prehistoric Races of the United States of America, in which he took note of the discovery in Germany of the remains of Neanderthals—those heavy-browed prehumans (so it was thought)—and the long periods he believed would have been necessary for human evolution to have taken place. He wrote, “The Indian possesses a conformation of skull which clearly separates him from the prehistoric Mound Builder.” This was the opposite conclusion from that of Dr. Morton of Philadelphia three decades or so earlier. On the other hand, while Morton believed that the ancestors of the contemporary Indians were the mound builders, the Indians were, in Morton's view, nonetheless of a lesser race of men. In this period many people of a scientific bent believed that humanity had originated once—as in the biblical tale—and may well have subsequently degenerated into several races. This was called monogenism. Others—and Morton was among them—believed in polygenism, meaning that the several races had originated independently and were separate and, by implication, some were lesser species. Polygenism made it all the easier to justify slavery and other racial practices (just as making one's national adversaries seem less than human makes it easier on the mind to kill them: in World War II, for example, the Japanese were widely represented in theUnited States as vicious little bucktoothed killer monkeys). In a condemnation that echoes that of Father Ortiz three centuries earlier and was in keeping with the polygenist view of humanity, the Chicago scientist Foster wrote rather gratuitously of the Indian:

  His character, since first known to the white man, has been signaled by treachery and cruelty. He repels all efforts to raise him from his degraded position: and whilst he has not the moral nature to adopt the virtues of civilization, his brutal instincts lead him to welcome its vices. He was never known voluntarily to engage in an enterprise requiring methodical labor…. To suppose that such a race threw up the strong lines of circumvallation and the symmetrical mounds which crown so many of our river-terraces, is as preposterous, almost, as to suppose they built the pyramids of Egypt.

  Then, in a peculiar leap, Foster went on to assert that the mound builders had had skulls similar to those called Neanderthal, meaning that they had been of “a low intellectual organization, little removed from that of the idiot.” Most of the mound builders, he explained, had been “mild, inoffensive” people who had placidly and unquestioningly built the mounds under the direction of a postulated handful of Svengalis (whose superior skulls had not been preserved—or found—and so were not available for inspection). So dim-witted were these people that they would have easily fallen prey to “treacherous” and “degraded” Indians once they appeared on the scene.

  It is, of course, easy and amusing to look back on the suggestions, theories, and certainties of earlier times and to ridicule them from the convenient advantage of simply having come along later, when more information and better techniques are available. Anyone who does so, however, deserves to be treated similarly by people who are yet to follow and who, in turn, will benefit from even greater information and even more sophisticated techniques for obtaining and analyzing it. Even so, Foster's “idiot savant” theory of the mound builders does seem to have been stretching that day's scientific reasoning to the point of bursting—and soon enough an especially tough-minded contemporary man of science would say so.

  It is worth remembering as well that during the time white Americans were looking for answers about the mounds and the mound builders, they were also busily shoving Native Americans out of their way—by treaty, purchase, deception, and, whenever needed, brute force—in order to achieve America's Manifest Destiny, which was to see white settlers on the land from sea to shining sea. Demonizing the native populations made it all the easier to displace them or eliminate them. By the time (1880) that the notion of an ancient race of mound builders came under serious and sustained attack by the slowly advancing practice of archaeology, the only real resistance to white Manifest Destiny that remained came from a few hundred Chiricahua Apaches who were busily raiding white settlers (and Mexicans) in Arizona while holding off about one-quarter of the U.S. Army. All the other tribes were either extinct or living uneasily on reservations of one sort or another. But in 1886, when Geronimo and his band of about fifty men, women, and children surrendered to the cavalry and were packed off to prison camp, it was still necessary for most Americans who thought about them at all to make out Indians as lesser beings—certainly not “us.”

  One American who didn't hold that view was John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first successful expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, and who became late-nineteenth-century America's most important scientist. He was in effect the creator and director of both the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of American Ethnology (the latter being part of the Smithsonian Institution). Among other things, these two agencies put the U.S. government solidly into the business of science, from which position it became the world's most generous scientific patron.

  Powell was a largely self-taught naturalist who became especially expert in geology and Indian linguistics during his several expeditions into the American Southwest. As a boy he had spent a good deal of time poking around the mounds in the Midwest, where he had been raised the son of a farmer and itinerant Methodist preacher. By 1881, though, when he had grown to be the government's leading science administrator, he was not very interested in prehistory. Instead he recognized that the cultures of the present-day Native Americans were rapidly disappearing, and he wanted to document them before they were completely gone. (This was aperception widely shared at the time—even, sadly, by most of the tribes themselves.)

  John Wesley Powell (right) with an unidentified Native American woman.

  In the first publication of the Bureau of Ethnology, Powell devoted only 8 of 638 pages to the mounds, saying—correctly, we now know—that they had clearly been the work of the ancestors of modern tribes, and that most likely they had come from several different stocks and worked at severaldifferent times. The next year Congress demanded that Powell devote one-fifth ($5,000) of his next appropriation to the mound builders.
Powell grumbled but complied, appointing a botanist and geologist, Cyrus Thomas, to head a division of the bureau given over to the mounds. In the Bureau of Ethnography's second annual report in 1882, Powell returned to the topic, attacking “false statements” and “absurdities” in the accounts of so-called mound experts, along with the “garbling and perversion of the lower class of writers.” Earlier researchers, he wrote, “were swept by blind zeal into serious errors even when they were not imposed upon by frauds and forgeries.”

  Some of those “earlier researchers” were still at work, among them the members of the Davenport, Iowa, Academy of Sciences, who prided themselves on their archaeological expertise. A squabble soon broke out when the Bureau of Ethnography's second annual report suggested that the academicians of Davenport had fallen prey to a hoax when they had held up some effigies as elephantine, thus “proving” that the mound builders had coexisted with the mammoths. (Among the artifacts turning up from the mounds from time to time were also “tablets” inscribed with one or another form of ancient script, such as one found in Newark, Ohio, by a man who had already convinced himself that the mound builders were Hebrews. On this tablet, found in 1860, appeared what was billed as a likeness of Moses along with his name and, on the flip side, the ten commandments. The town of Newark was something of a center for the manufacture of fake artifacts for the tourist trade.) In Davenport, the locals accused the Smithsonian, with its overwhelming influence, of intellectual tyranny in the field of archaeology, an accusation that wasn't yet true but would prove so in a few more decades.